Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Pakistan: Fallout From a Report of U.S. Attacks
February 18, 2009 | 2223 GMT


A Predator UAV

Summary

A Feb. 18 British media report says that the United States is launching attacks in Pakistan from Pakistani soil. Regardless of the report’s accuracy, the idea of U.S. forces using Pakistani soil for air and other operations will rouse emotions in Pakistan, something radical Islamists can exploit.

Analysis

The United States has been launching unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northwestern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) from Shamsi airfield in southwestern Pakistan’s Balochistan province, some 190 miles southwest of the city of Quetta near the borders with Afghanistan and Iran, for at least a year, British daily The Times reported Feb. 18.

The Times cited U.S. orders for fuel to the base, runway lengths and local witnesses who said they had seen UAVs taking off as evidence. A photo backing up the claim, apparently from Google Earth, copyrighted 2006 shows the distinctive shape of three UAVs — either MQ-9 Reapers or RQ-1 Predators — parked on the tarmac at Shamsi. While Pakistan operates its own fleet of smaller UAVs (none with the distinctive shape and wingspan of the Predator/Reaper design, however), Western sources and Pakistani officials reportedly confirmed to the British daily that the United States has launched UAV strikes on targets in Pakistan from Pakistani soil.

MAP: U.S. Air Bases in Afghanistan/Pakistan


Washington has used Pakistani air bases off and on since December 2001 in connection with the invasion of Afghanistan, so there is nothing new in the reports that the United States is using Pakistani soil for operations. In fact, Stratfor has been discussing covert U.S. military activity in Pakistan for several years. A Feb. 12 statement from U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein kicked off the latest frenzy of reporting on the subject. Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s northwestern region, saying, “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base.”

We approach these reports with skepticism, as the British media at times has exaggerated covert U.S. military operations. Moreover, reports that the UAVs photographed in Balochistan province are RQ-4 Global Hawks are inaccurate. The wingspan of a single Global Hawk is twice as wide as that of a Predator. In short, the reports coming out today are unsurprising, and inaccurate in certain particulars.

Undisputedly, however, the reports have further riled up the Pakistani government and public. Even before the story surfaced, military and civilian leaders had spoken out against — and called for a halt to — U.S. airstrikes in FATA under pressure from national sentiment. The tremendous public anger at Pakistani decision-makers for allowing what are seen as violations of the South Asian country’s sovereignty is matched by strong opposition reservations within the country’s powerful security establishment to U.S. operations, even though Islamabad officially rejects the claims that it has agreed to U.S. airstrikes.

Politically, accusations that U.S. forces not only are striking at targets in Pakistan but also are launching aircraft from Pakistani bases will cause more trouble for the government in Islamabad, which has become as unpopular as its predecessor. Already weak due to an array of internal and external pressures, Islamabad now will face even more criticism over these allegations as well as subsequent instability. Nationwide protests planned by lawyers for March 9 could escalate beyond demands to reinstate judges, including former Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, into outright grievances against the government, especially on the issue of territorial sovereignty.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda and the Taliban use reports like these to manipulate Pakistani popular sentiment, which could facilitate additional attacks against military installations (regardless of whether they house U.S. personnel). Jihadists as well as other radical Islamist forces have successfully argued that the Pakistani military is facilitating U.S. attacks against Pakistanis, and thus accuse it of being complicit in what is perceived as an American war against Islam and Muslims. This could also make U.S. personnel in Pakistan increasingly likely to be targeted, and the larger formations the Taliban has begun operating in could be a significant concern for a small U.S. contingent at a remote airfield.

If the United States is indeed using Pakistani air bases to carry out predator strikes, security might be an increased concern. While it would be impossible for the United States to operate such bases in total secrecy, it obviously is in their best interests to keep a low profile. The Pakistani military would have to know about the bases, and would be in charge of providing perimeter security for the areas. Between locals susceptible to ideological arguments and militant intimidation, perhaps leading to compromised military security, an attack could well be mounted on installations suspected of serving as bases for U.S. operations.

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Thursday February 19, 2009
Pakistan hopes to dilute extremism with near-extremism

MIDWEEK
By BUNN NAGARA

Officials appear to have given up the fight against militants in the country’s north-west.

PAKISTAN began the week by caving in to militant demands for syariah law in Swat valley in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), critics say amid government denials.

On Monday the government announced that civil law in Malakand and Kohistan would be replaced by syariah, an objective of Islamist militants, in exchange for a ceasefire. But Islamabad says it is doing only what the local people want, denying that it is a concession or surrender of any kind.

The problem is in getting anyone to believe it. Convincing the public is important but difficult, while convincing the militants themselves is crucial but virtually impossible.

The picturesque Swat, once a popular alpine resort, has in just over a year been the scene of gross butchery by extremists, including many beheadings, nearly 200 girls schools burnt, and a refugee outflow of up to half a million.

The US response this week has been cautious, since after eight years of US neo-conservatism any condemnation would be reviled in Pakistan. That left Britain, Nato and human rights groups leading the criticism, but the fiercest critics are Pakistanis themselves.

This is the third time the government is working with pro-Taliban Maulana Sufi Mohammad, after the first two deals flopped. The hope now is that he and his Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariah-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) will persuade his Taliban son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah and his group to stop the fighting.

Reports yesterday said the idea came from the military, since troops and paramilitary forces had been swatted mercilessly by militants despite outnumbering them five to one. Soldiers thus avoid close-range fighting, resort to artillery bombardment, kill rural civilians and fuel sympathy for militants, as local police desert their posts.

In the ensuing chaos came the popular longing for order. And a form of syariah (the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation) had been around on paper for 10 years already, so the decision is now made to enact it.

Some government officials may actually believe what they say about the plan being perhaps a compromise, but not a concession or capitulation. The older Maulana is “merely” a Taliban admirer while the younger scourge is the real thing itself; the purpose is to secure peace and order; and Swat residents are Muslim and so deserve syariah.

However, the larger problem is that all these three arguments reveal rather than explain away the government’s weaknesses. President Asif Ali Zardari’s quip about facing “an absence of options” well sums up his predicament.

First, for officials to rely on co-opting an ageing pro-Taliban leader to neutralise a younger Taliban leader reeks of real desperation. Not only are their political differences unclear, unpredictable and impermanent, but the younger one is likely to outlive and succeed the older.

When the older Maulana recently returned home upon release from prison, he was welcomed as a hero by supporters and supposed Taliban rivals alike. One day after the peace was supposed to take hold, a deadly bomb blast in the provincial capital of Peshawar killed at least eight people.

Second, granting power to a former government adversary to secure peace and order is an admission that government security forces have failed to do it themselves. And with policing that peace and order comes the power to impose a system based on the militants’ interpretation of syariah.

Since the government would not admit to its weakness, particularly when it is at its weakest, official statements are not being taken literally. It is getting harder and harder to avoid the perception that officials are sliding on a slippery slope, ready to be impaled on the thin end of the extremist wedge.

Third, the argument that Swat residents are Muslim and therefore deserve syariah could soon become self-defeating. Some 97% of Pakistanis nationwide are Muslim, so why should syariah be for Swat alone when the argument justifies making it the sole law of the land?

The point plays directly into the hands of extremist groups, while the policy only encourages them in their armed struggle. Besides, allowing syariah for only a part of the country promotes two classes of Muslims and a divided country.

In the past two years the Taliban has regrouped and al-Qaeda made inroads from across the border in Afghanistan. This week’s decision has all the makings of a risky gamble when gambling is taboo, so the move is all the riskier for that.

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Journalist killed in Taliban region

• Story Highlights
• Journalist for Pakistan's GEO TV killed in Taliban-area of the country
• GEO says Mosa Khankhel was shot and his attackers tried to behead him
• Khankhel was traveling with Taliban lead negotiator when he went missing
• Incident happened in Swat where Pakistan-Taliban agreed to allow sharia law

From Zein Basravi
CNN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Attackers in a Taliban-controlled area of Pakistan shot and tried to behead a Pakistani journalist on Wednesday, according to his employer GEO TV.

The slain correspondent, Mosa Khankhel, had been covering the recent peace deal between the Pakistani government and Taliban militants in Swat Valley when he was killed, GEO TV managing director Azhar Abbas said.

"He is the first martyr of this peace deal," Abbas said, adding that he believes it is unlikely the deal will end the campaign of violence that has centered in Swat.

Khankhel was traveling in a caravan with Sufi Mohammed, who was leading the peace deal negotiations for the Taliban, when he went missing, Abbas said.

His body was found about an hour later. He had been shot three times and his killers had attempted to cut off his head.

Abbas called on Pakistan's government to fully investigate the killing of Khankhel, who was the network's correspondent based in North West Frontier Province as part of GEO TV's Peshawar bureau.

His death comes a day after Pakistan's government recognized the Taliban's interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, in the entire Malakand Division, which includes Swat and its surrounding district.

The agreement marked a major concession by Pakistan in its attempt to hold off Taliban militants who have terrorized the region with beheadings, kidnappings, death threats, and the destruction of girls' schools.

The regional government in the Swat valley struck the deal to allow sharia law, in return the Taliban agreed to a 10-day cease fire.

The Taliban control of Swat -- which is about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad -- is the deepest advance by militants into Pakistan's settled areas, which are located outside its federally administered tribal region along the border with Afghanistan.

The peace deal is the latest attempt by Pakistan's civilian government -- which took power last year -- to achieve peace through diplomacy in areas where Taliban and al Qaeda leaders are believed to have free rein.

But analysts as well as critics within the establishment have warned that Pakistan's previous dealings with the Taliban have only given the fundamentalist Islamic militia time to regroup and gain more ground.

Khadim Hussain, a professor Bahria University in Islamabad who studies Pakistani politics, said the government has set the stage for two contradictory, parallel states in North West Frontier Province.

"If you leave them like that and you give ... a semblance of peace in a particular area, what does that mean?" Hussain said. "It means you're capitulating. It means you're surrendering the state to them. It means your submitting the state authority to them because they are running a parallel state."

He said the government's decision amounts to a marriage of convenience made under duress.

Swat has been overrun by forces loyal to Maulana Fazlullah's banned hardline Islamic group, Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) which has allied itself with Taliban fighters.

TNSM was once led by Sufi Mohammed, Fazlullah's father-in-law, who is leading the latest negotiations.

Sufi Mohammed was released from jail last year by Pakistani authorities after he agreed to cooperate with the government. He was jailed in 2002 after recruiting thousands of fighters to battle U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Fazlullah took over TNSM during Sufi Mohammed's jail stint and vowed to continue his fight to impose fundamentalist Islamic law in the region.
Last May, Pakistan's government announced it reached a peace deal with militants in Swat Valley.

In the months that have followed, the Taliban have seized control of the region and carried out a violent campaign against government officials, including local politicians.

The head of the secular Awami National Party -- which represents the region -- was forced to flee to Islamabad amid death threats from the Taliban.

Pakistan is under enormous pressure to control the militants within its borders, blamed for launching attacks in neighboring Afghanistan where U.S. and NATO forces are fighting militants.

The United States -- using unmanned drones -- has carried out several airstrikes inside Pakistan on suspected militant targets, including one on Monday that killed at least 15 people, Pakistani sources said.

Such airstrikes, which sometimes result in civilian casualties, have aggravated tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan.

Pakistan's military operation in the region is unpopular among Pakistanis, but efforts to deal diplomatically with militants have not worked in the past.

Pakistan's previous leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, reached a cease-fire deal with militants in South Waziristan in 2006 which was widely blamed for giving al Qaeda and Taliban a stronger foothold in the region.

CNN's Stan Grant contributed to this report

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From The Times
February 19, 2009
Violence still a threat in Swat Valley despite Sharia deal

Zahid Hussain in Islamabad



Waving black and white flags and chanting “God is great!” thousands of men marched through the streets of the main town in Swat Valley yesterday, led by a hardline cleric who called for peace in return for the enforcement of Islamic law.

“I have come here to establish peace and I will not leave until this has been achieved,” Sufi Mohammad, the aging, white-bearded leader of an outlawed Islamic movement, told his supporters in Mingora, the main town in the area.

On Monday the regional government in northwest Pakistan struck a peace deal with Mr Muhammad, who was released recently after spending six years in jail for leading thousands of his supporters to Afghanistan to fight American forces in 2001.

In return for the imposition of Sharia, the pro-Taleban cleric is expected to persuade Mullah Fazlullah, his son-in-law, who is spearheading the insurgency, to lay down arms.

“It will be a good step if it ends the bloodletting,” Mohammed Jaffer, whose grocery business has suffered hugely as a result of the fighting, said as he watched from his shop doorway. It is a common sentiment in Swat, desperate for peace after years of violence. But reining in Mullah Fazlullah will be no easy task.

The firebrand cleric, 33, has turned what was once a favoured tourist destination into a byword for terror. The Taleban in Swat has conducted a campaign of beheadings, lynchings and bombings, and although Mullah Fazlullah announced a ten-day ceasefire on Sunday, analysts said that there was no indication that he would agree to put his weapons aside.

A similar deal last year collapsed in a few months and was blamed for giving the insurgents time to regroup. Many people — including Western politicians — accuse the Government of surrendering to terrorism and abdicating its responsibility to protect the lives and property of the people.

“This deal shows that the Pakistani Army has been defeated by the militants and the State is incapable of retaining control over its territory,” Athar Minallah, a leading lawyer and a former provincial minister, said.

At the end of 2007 Islamabad sent thousands of troops to quell the insurgency as the Taleban expanded its influence from the semiautonomous tribal areas into parts of the North West Frontier Province of which Swat, with a population if 1.3 million, forms a part.

Even though Swat does not border Afghanistan, Mullah Fazlullah pledges allegiance to Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taleban movement.

Security officials say that large numbers of fighters from Waziristan, along with Uzbeks and Chechens, have joined the insurgents in Swat. That means that as many as 8,000 well-armed militants, allegedly funded by Arab charities, have been fighting government forces in Swat.

Mullah Fazlullah is also known as Mullah Radio for his sermons broadcast on a pirate radio station. He has declared a holy war against the Pakistani Government and in effect established a parallel Islamic regime.

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Pakistani Accord Appears Stalled

Government, Extremists Make No Move To Formalize Their Pact on Islamic Law

By Pamela Constable, Karen DeYoung and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 19, 2009; A09

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 18 -- A controversial, closely watched peace agreement designed to end Taliban violence in the scenic Swat Valley hung in limbo Wednesday amid criticism in Pakistan and rising concern in Washington.

Neither the Pakistani government nor the Islamic extremists were willing to formalize the accord, announced by Pakistani officials Monday. The proposed pact marks an unprecedented and risky attempt to disarm about 2,000 Taliban fighters, who have invaded and terrorized a once-bucolic area of 1.5 million in northwestern Pakistan, by offering to install a strict system of Islamic law in the surrounding district.

Supporters see the offer as an urgently needed bid for peace and a potential model for other areas ravaged by Pakistan's growing Islamist militancy, which now controls areas 80 miles from the capital of this nuclear-armed Muslim nation. Critics say it would make too many concessions to ruthless religious forces and provide them with a launching pad to drive deeper into the settled areas of Pakistan from their safe haven in the rough tribal districts along the border with Afghanistan.

"This is a bad idea that sends a very wrong signal," said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of defense and security studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the capital. "It legitimizes the existence of violent armed groups and allows them to draw the wrong lesson: that if you are powerful enough to challenge the writ of the state, it will cave in and appease you."

In Washington, where the Obama administration has been conspicuously silent about the agreement, officials said privately that they considered it a major setback for U.S. goals in the region. "It's a surrender disguised as a truce," one official said, describing it as an admission that the government lacks the capacity to defend the crucial western part of the country.

Several officials said the proposed pact was evidence that the Pakistani government has no coherent plan for combating militancy. One noted that Islamabad had offered no comprehensive package of economic aid or outlined a long-term structure for the region. "This is signing a deal and calling it done," this official said. "What comes next?"

In December, Pakistani military efforts to roust the Taliban from the Swat Valley were defeated by the far smaller extremist force. The military "met resistance that they and we didn't expect," a U.S. official said, citing sophisticated Taliban tactics, command and communications and participation by extremists from Chechnya and Afghanistan. The military, he said, "won some tactical victories; they didn't win their strategic objectives."

Monday's proposed peace accord took the Obama administration by surprise, U.S. officials said. They received no advance notice of the deal and remained uncertain of what was happening on the ground. "We're not even sure if it's a real deal," a senior U.S. military official said.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic and military sensitivities, said they hoped for clarification by next week, when senior Pakistani and Afghan delegations are due to arrive in Washington for high-level talks that are part of the administration's strategic review of the Afghan war effort and its policy toward Pakistan and the region.

The delegations will be headed by the foreign ministers of the two countries and will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, among others. Holbrooke, who set up the visits during a tour of the region last week, said Wednesday that the administration expected two things from the meetings. "One, a sense of both countries that they are participating actively in shaping our strategy toward their countries, that it's not just a unilateral dictat. Secondly, " he said, "to stimulate them to do similar strategic thinking."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose government faces an identical challenge from Taliban insurgents controlling large portions of the Afghan countryside, plans to travel to Islamabad on Thursday for talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and other officials.

In the Swat Valley, a second day of confusion and uncertainty about the pact passed Wednesday, with rising hopes and a jubilant peace march among the local population, followed by the brutal killing of a Pakistani TV journalist, Musa Khan Khel. He was apparently seized and shot by militants while covering the peace march, despite a Taliban offer of a 10-day cease-fire while elements of the accord are implemented. Thousands of people turned out Wednesday morning in Swat to cheer and follow a delegation of religious and political leaders who entered the Taliban-controlled territory to persuade the extremists to sign the pact and put down their weapons. The Taliban has ravaged the once-pristine, affluent area for months, burning schools, killing police and ordering women to remain home. More than half the populace is believed to have fled their homes.

Leaders of Pakistan's secular Awami National Party, which orchestrated the deal, insist that it will bring a better justice system to the region and that they can reason with the Taliban because they are from the same ethnic Pashtun tribe. But other prominent Pakistanis assert that civilian leaders underestimate the danger posed by the insurgents.

"All segments of society and the general public need to be educated that Talibanization is a real and serious threat to the country, and that if nothing is done to stop its advance, then the anarchy will spread," Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence chief in North-West Frontier Province, wrote in the News newspaper Tuesday. Pakistan's intelligence service once helped create Islamist militias to fight other wars.

In Swat, where followers of a nonviolent Islamist leader named Sufi Mohammad have been demanding the enforcement of Islamic law for years, the announcement of the agreement Monday was greeted by relief and hope. Shops reopened and people flooded the streets after months of hurrying home in fear. Preparations were made to welcome Mohammad, who had offered to come to Swat and persuade the fighters to lay down their arms.

On Wednesday morning, Mohammad's "caravan of peace" made its way into the valley, and thousands of well-wishers rallied in the central town of Mingaora. Many people seemed nervous and uncertain, however, and black-turbaned Taliban fighters were seen patrolling the outskirts of the city with weapons and walkie-talkies.

"We want peace at any cost," Gul Bad Shah, 46, a shopkeeper in one town said as the marchers passed. "We are very happy to see the hustle and bustle in the markets after a long time." A college student named Rehmanullah, 22, said the Taliban movement in Swat "will evaporate once the law is implemented in letter and spirit."

All day, Mohammad and his delegation moved from town to town, chanting for peace and hearing the cheers of supporters. Senior provincial officials and legislators, who rarely dare to venture into Swat these days, accompanied them. But a negotiating committee from the Taliban continued to meet in an undisclosed location and made no public comment.

The government's position on the deal also remained unclear, creating further anxiety. President Zardari, reportedly under pressure from the West, went a second day without signing the pact or making public the details of the law system. Several leaders in Swat told Geo television that they could co-exist with the Taliban and blamed the government for sabotaging their chance for peace.

But by late afternoon, news that Khan Khel had been slain while covering the march seemed to mock public hopes that the extremists' word could be trusted. Videos on the evening news showed him interviewing smiling people along the route, interspersed with images of colleagues carrying his corpse.

"He was with us all day on the march, and then suddenly we heard he had been kidnapped and killed and his body dumped on the road," said Irfan Ashraf, a reporter for Dawn television, speaking from Swat. "He was a journalist to the core, a sweet guy, and now he is no more here with us."

DeYoung reported from Washington. Khan reported from Mingaora. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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Pentagon Quietly Sending 1,000 Special Operators to Afghanistan
FOX News ^ | June 5, 2009 | By Rowan Scarborough The Pentagon is sending 1,000 more special operations forces and support staff into Afghanistan to bolster a larger conventional troop buildup, and is revamping the way Army Green Berets and other commandos work to rid villages of the Taliban.


While much of the public focus has been on 24,000 additional American troops moving into the country this year, U.S. Special Operations Command is quietly increasing its covert warriors in what could be a pivotal role in finally defeating insurgents, military sources tell FOXNews.com.
The movement comes as Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a special operator who led successful manhunts in Iraq for Al Qaeda terrorists, is about to take command in Afghanistan.


McChrystal, who underwent a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing Tuesday, is expected to put more emphasis on using commandos in counterinsurgency operations and on finding or killing key Taliban leaders.


(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...

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September 22, 2009
News Analysis
In a General’s Grim Assessment of Afghanistan, a Catalyst for Obama
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — President Obama could read the grim assessment of the Afghanistan war from his top military commander there in two possible ways.

He could read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s report as a blunt and impassioned last-chance plea for a revamped counterinsurgency strategy bolstered by thousands more combat troops to rescue the beleaguered, eight-year mission.

Or he could read it as a searing indictment of American-led NATO military operations and a corrupt Afghan civilian government, pitted against a surprisingly adaptive and increasingly dangerous insurgency.

Either way, General McChrystal’s 66-page report with the deceptively bland title “Commander’s Initial Assessment” is serving to catalyze the thinking of a president — who is keenly aware of the historical perils of a protracted, faraway war — about what he can realistically accomplish in this conflict, and whether his vision for the war and a commitment of American troops is the same as his general’s.

Mr. Obama faces a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, growing opposition to the war at home from Democrats and a desire to put off any major troop decision while he still needs much political capital to pass major health care legislation in Congress.

But even as the president expresses skepticism about sending more American troops to Afghanistan until he has settled on the right strategy, he is also grappling with a stark reality: it will be very hard to say no to General McChrystal.

Mr. Obama has called Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” and in the most basic terms he has the same goal as President George W. Bush did after the Sept. 11 attacks, to prevent another major terrorist assault.

“Whatever decisions I make are going to be based first on a strategy to keep us safe, then we’ll figure out how to resource it,” Mr. Obama said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We’re not going to put the cart before the horse and just think by sending more troops we’re automatically going to make Americans safe,” he said.

The White House expects General McChrystal’s request to be not just for American troops but for NATO forces as well. This week, the White House is sending questions about his review back to the general in Kabul, Afghanistan, and expects to get responses by the end of next week.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview Monday that he wants to know how the uncertainty surrounding the recent Afghan elections and a plan to reintegrate Taliban fighters into Afghan society could affect General McChrystal’s troop request.

Mr. Obama has had only one meeting so far on the McChrystal review, but aides plan to schedule three or four more after he returns from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh at the end of this week.

Aides said it should take weeks, not months, to make a decision. “The president’s been very clear in our discussion that he’s open-minded and he’s not going to be swayed by political correctness one way or the other,” Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said in an interview. “Different people are going to have different opinions, and he wants to hear them, but at the end of the day, he’s going to do what he thinks is the right thing for the United States and most especially for the men and women who have to respond to his orders.”

Senior officers who work with General McChrystal say he was surprised by the dire condition of the Afghan mission when he assumed command in June.

His concerns went beyond the strength and resilience of the insurgency. General McChrystal was surprised by the lack of efficient military organization at the NATO headquarters and that a significant percentage of the troops were not positioned to carry out effective counterinsurgency operations.

There was a sense among General McChrystal’s staff that the military effort in Afghanistan was disjointed and had not learned from the lessons of the past years of the war.

“We haven’t been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years,” said one officer. “We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for one year, eight times in a row.”

In his assessment, General McChrystal also portrayed a more sophisticated Taliban foe that uses propaganda effectively and taps into the Afghan prison system as a training ground.

Taliban leaders based in Pakistan appoint shadow governors for most provinces, install their own courts, levy taxes, conscript fighters and wield savvy propagandists. They stand in sharp contrast to a corrupt and inept government.

And Taliban fighters exert control not only through bombs and bullets. “The insurgents wage a ‘silent war’ of fear, intimidation and persuasion throughout the year — not just during the warmer weather ‘fighting season’ — to gain control over the population,” the general said in his report.

Administration officials said that the general’s assessment, while very important, was just one component in the president’s thinking.

Asked on CNN on Sunday why after eight months in office he was still searching for a strategy, Mr. Obama took issue. “We put a strategy in place, clarified our goals, but what the election has shown, as well as changing circumstances in Pakistan, is that this is going to be a very difficult operation,” he said, referring to the Afghan election. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re constantly refining it to keep our focus on what our primary goals are.”

Peter Baker and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

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U.S. Commanders Told to Shift Focus to More Populated Areas

By Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military officer in Afghanistan, has told his commanders to pull forces out of sparsely populated areas where U.S. troops have fought bloody battles with the Taliban for several years and focus them on protecting major Afghan population centers.

But the changes, which amount to a retreat from some areas, have already begun to draw resistance from senior Afghan officials who worry that any pullback from Taliban-held territory will make the weak Afghan government appear even more powerless in the eyes of its people.

Senior U.S. officials said the moves were driven by the realization that some remote regions of Afghanistan, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountains that range through the northeast, were not going to be brought under government control anytime soon. "Personally, I think I am being realistic about this," said Maj. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. "I have more combat power than my predecessors did, but I won't be as spread out. . . . This is all about freeing up some forces so I can get them out more among the people."

The changes are in line with McChrystal's confidential assessment of the war, which urges U.S. and NATO forces to "initially focus on critical high-population areas that are contested or controlled by insurgents."

The conflict between McChrystal's new strategy and the Afghan government has been most pronounced in Nurestan province, a forbidding region bordering Pakistan where U.S. commanders have been readying plans since late last year to pull out their soldiers and shutter outposts. Instead of leaving the area, U.S. commanders have actually been forced to bolster their presence in recent months.

In early July, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked senior U.S. officials to dispatch a company of about 100 U.S. soldiers to Barge Matal, a village in the northern half of the province that is home to fewer than 500 people. Taliban insurgents had overrun the community and Karzai was insistent that that U.S. and Afghan forces wrest it back from the enemy. "I don't think anyone in the U.S. military wanted to be up there," said a senior military official who oversees troops fighting in the village.

Senior military officials had hoped to be out of Barge Matal in about a week, but the deployment has stretched on for more than two months as U.S. and Afghan forces have battled Taliban insurgents. Some insurgents seemed to be moving into the area from neighboring Pakistan solely to fight the U.S. troops there, said military officials. At least one U.S. soldier has been killed and several have been wounded.

Although the U.S. finally pulled its troops out of the village this week, the extended deployment to the area has had ripple effects throughout eastern Afghanistan, forcing frustrated U.S. military officials to postpone plans made months earlier to abandon other remote bases.

Because troops are especially vulnerable to ambush when they are closing a base, large numbers of cargo helicopters are needed to quickly pull soldiers and their equipment out of the area. For the last two months, a huge percentage of the U.S. cargo helicopter fleet in eastern Afghanistan has been dedicated to ferrying supplies to soldiers in Barge Matal, where there are few passable roads.

The remote area also has put large demands on the fleet of unmanned surveillance aircraft in Afghanistan, which are needed to help safeguard soldiers as they close outposts in hostile areas.

Most of the U.S. bases that commanders want to shutter in Nurestan were set up in 2004 and 2005 to interdict Taliban and foreign fighters moving through the area from Pakistan. "They made sense as a launching pad to go after the enemy when we were in more of a counterterrorism fight," said Col. Randy George, who oversees U.S. troops in four provinces in eastern Afghanistan. "But we are in a different strategy right now."

McChrystal's new strategy for Afghanistan places a priority on protecting the population and bolstering the Afghan government and its security forces. The soldiers in Nurestan are not well positioned to perform either of those missions.

At Combat Outpost Lowell, about 110 U.S. and Afghan troops regularly visit the village of Kamu, which is right outside the base and has approximately 70 men. But the troops aren't able to patrol any of the other villages in the area, some of which are less than two miles away, because the security in the area is too precarious and the terrain surrounding their base is too rugged.

U.S. and Afghan forces at Combat Outpost Keating, also in Nurestan, are even more constrained. The base is about one mile from the Taliban-controlled village of Kamdesh, but more than 100 U.S. and Afghan troops there haven't set foot in the village in more than three months. On rare occasions, the elders from the local shura, or council, will come and discuss reconstruction projects with troops at the outpost.

The troops there could be put to far better use in other regions, said George, who first developed plans to shut down the two outposts in December. "They are protecting themselves in those areas, and the bottom line is that is not enough," he said. "They don't get off the base enough because of what it takes to defend those places and the security situation up there."

The colonel said he would like to use those soldiers to bolster the U.S. force in the Konar River valley, a more populated area where the United States is spending tens of millions of dollars to pave the valley's main thoroughfare. Other soldiers based in Nurestan could be redirected to the outskirts of Jalalabad, one of Afghanistan's largest cities, where the terrain is less rugged and U.S. forces can more easily interact with local leaders and the people.

The shifts are in line with orders from McChrystal and Scaparrotti, who have directed commanders throughout Afghanistan to focus more of their efforts on areas where the United States can show demonstrable progress in the next year. "If you get into the areas where most of the people are, they are relatively secure in those areas and there is great opportunity to help the Afghans with governance and development," Scaparrotti said. Another U.S. official described the move as an effort to get some "quick wins."

U.S. officials are still hopeful that they will be able to close remote outposts throughout the country that no longer make sense. But the reaction from senior Afghan officials to the Taliban takeover of Barge Matal shows that ceding even the most isolated and seemingly unimportant terrain to the Taliban can create political problems for the Afghan government.

"We've learned that there is a political component" to the closures, George said. "A change in strategy is something the Afghans have to understand. You have to socialize it with them."

Instead of simply leaving the outposts, U.S. commanders are increasingly working with local elders in Nurestan to develop plans for residents to provide for their own security with some help from U.S. forces and the Afghan government. In the area around Kamdesh, U.S. military officials recently sent a letter to Mullah Sadiq, an insurgent leader who has been a high-value target for U.S. forces since 2006, asking for his help in developing a security force made up of local men. Although Sadiq has advocated violence against U.S. forces, he has asked his followers not to attack Afghan soldiers or Afghan government officials.

"We ask for your guidance in developing a plan that will improve security and development in Kamdesh," said the letter from Lt. Col. Brad Brown, the senior commander in the area. The push to develop an alliance with Sadiq has the support of local Afghan commanders, though it is unclear whether it has the backing of more senior Afghan officials in Kabul.

The U.S. military has only a few months left to close some of its more remote outposts in mountainous eastern Afghanistan before winter, when such operations become much more logistically complex. Scaparrotti said he is confident that the United States will be able to shutter several bases and reposition forces before winter arrives. But commanders are also hedging their bets. George recently gave orders to the commanders at both the Lowell and Keating bases to prepare their outposts for the cold.

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General's Review Creates Rupture
As Military Backs Call for More Troops In Afghanistan, Civilian Advisers Balk

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's grim assessment of the Afghanistan war has opened a divide between the military, which is pushing for an early decision to send more troops, and civilian policymakers who are increasingly doubtful of an escalating nation-building effort.

Senior military officials emphasized Monday that McChrystal's conclusion that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure" without an urgent infusion of troops has been endorsed by the uniformed leadership. That includes Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command and architect of the troop "surge" strategy widely seen as helping U.S. forces turn the corner in Iraq.

But before any decision is made, some of President Obama's civilian advisers have proposed looking at other, less costly options to address his primary goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing itself in Afghanistan. Those options include a redirection of U.S. efforts -- away from protecting the Afghan population and building the Afghan state and toward persuading the Taliban to stop fighting -- as well as an escalation of targeted attacks against al-Qaeda itself in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Obama's public remarks on Afghanistan indicate that he has begun to rethink the counterinsurgency strategy he set in motion six months ago, even as his generals have embraced it. The equation on the ground has changed markedly since his March announcement, with attacks by Taliban fighters showing greater sophistication, U.S. casualties rising, and the chances increasing that Afghanistan will be left with an illegitimate government after widespread fraud in recent presidential elections.

In television interviews Sunday, Obama said he would take his time in weighing McChrystal's recommendations and an anticipated formal request for more troops. "The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?" Obama said on CNN. "Are we pursuing the right strategy?"

The commander's report, administration officials said, is only one of many "inputs" the president is considering. Others include assessments from the State Department, the intelligence community and his White House advisers.

Obama's decision is complicated by a deepening domestic political divide and no guarantee of success whichever option he chooses. One observer, characterizing the president's dilemma at its most extreme, said: "He can send more troops and it will be a disaster and he will destroy the Democratic Party. Or he can send no more troops and it will be a disaster and the Republicans will say he lost the war."

Few lawmakers had seen McChrystal's closely held report before an unclassified version was published by The Washington Post on its Web site Sunday night. Their reactions were sharply divided along party lines, with many Republicans advocating full support for the military commander.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement that he was "deeply troubled . . . by reports that the White House is delaying action on the General's request for more troops" and was questioning the "integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency" Obama himself set in motion. "It's time for the President to clarify where he stands on the strategy he has articulated," Boehner said, "because the longer we wait the more we put our troops at risk."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that "any failure to act decisively in response to General McChrystal's request could serve to undermine the other good decisions the president has made" on Afghanistan.

But Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Navy veteran of Vietnam who once led opposition to that war, praised Obama's deliberative pace.

"All the president is saying is that he wants to take the time to make sure this decision is not done like the Gulf of Tonkin" resolution, where "underlying assumptions aren't questioned," Kerry said. The 1964 joint congressional resolution, based on false information about North Vietnamese actions and adopted amid an anti-communist frenzy, authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia.

"You've got to figure out . . . what is the counterinsurgency mission," Kerry said. "The president has all the right in the world to properly vet that mission and define it. It may well be we'll all decide [McChrystal] is absolutely correct, and the mission he's defined is correct."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has positioned himself between the urgency expressed by military commanders and those calling for a reconsideration of the strategy, last week suggested that all involved take a "deep breath." He has told McChrystal to delay sending his formal request for additional resources until the policy discussion is further along.

But senior military officials have expressed growing frustration, while warning that delay could be costly. "Time does matter," said one military official. "The longer the situation deteriorates, the tougher to reclaim" the initiative against Taliban forces. Military and civilian officials agreed to discuss White House decision-making and McChrystal's report on the condition of anonymity.

This military official and others cautioned that any strategy revision that resulted in a pullback by U.S. and NATO forces would leave Taliban forces in uncontested control of territory and could lead to a return of civil war in Afghanistan, opening the door to reestablishment of al-Qaeda sanctuaries there.

But some civilian officials believe that such a scenario is based on possibly faulty assumptions about who the Taliban insurgents are, what their aims may be, and whether some can be co-opted. If Obama's core objective is to prevent al-Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan, this reasoning goes, it may not depend on defeating the Taliban. An equally viable policy, they argue, could include stepped-up, targeted attacks on al-Qaeda's sanctuaries in Pakistan and convincing amenable Taliban fighters that it is in their best interests to keep al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan.

Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

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September 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hard and Bitter Truth
By BOB HERBERT

President Obama is in the uncomfortable position of staring reality in the face in Afghanistan. Reality is not blinking.

The president’s handpicked point man in the war zone, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wants more troops and a stepped-up commitment by the United States that would lock us into the conflict indefinitely, with nothing like an exit strategy in sight, or even a conception of what victory might look like.

Mr. Obama himself has banged the war drums loudly, having already increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and declaring just last month that the war is absolutely essential to American security, that it “is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

Among the many problems for the president on this front is the sobering fact that most ordinary Americans do not seem to agree. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 51 percent of respondents believed the war has not been worth its costs, and only 26 percent favored sending more troops.

That does not bode well for an expensive and debilitating conflict that is about to enter its 9th year and would go on for untold years to come if the president decides to double down on America’s military commitment.

Senator John McCain gave us a compelling insight into these matters in a foreword that he wrote about Vietnam for David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest”:

“War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily,” he said. “It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

The only thing that needs to be updated about Mr. McCain’s comments is that we now regularly send women as well as men off to war.

In the case of Afghanistan, we’re sending them off to fight and possibly die in support of a government that is incompetent and riddled with corruption and narcotics traffickers. We’re putting them in the field with Afghan forces that are ill trained, ill equipped and in all-too-many instances unwilling to fight with the courage and tenacity of the American forces. And we’re sending them off to engage in a mishmash of a mission that alternates incoherently between aggressively fighting insurgents and the admirable but unachievable task of nation-building in a society in which most Americans are clueless about the history, culture, politics and mores.

In a confidential assessment of the war prepared for President Obama, General McChrystal wrote: “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials and [the American-led NATO force’s] own errors have given Afghans little reason to support their government.”

A friend of mine who lives in South Carolina sent me an e-mail about a young serviceman in civilian clothes whom she and her husband noticed as he talked on a public telephone in the Atlanta airport last week. He was 19 or 20 years old and quite thin. His clothes and his shoes were worn, my friend said, but the thing she noticed most “was the sadness in his eyes and his sweet demeanor.”

The young man was speaking to his mom in a voice that was quite emotional. My friend recalled him saying, “We’re about to board for Oklahoma for the training before we move out. I didn’t want to bother Amber at work, so please tell her I called if you don’t think it will upset her too much. ... I miss you all so much and love you, and I just don’t know how I’ll get through this.”

At the end of the call, the serviceman had tears in his eyes and my friend said she did, too. She wrote in the e-mail: “I stood up and wished him good luck, and he smiled the sweetest smile that has haunted me ever since.”

As President Obama tries to decide what to do about Afghanistan, reality is insisting that he take into account the worn-down condition of our military after so many years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the soaring budget deficits and sky-high unemployment numbers here at home in a country that is hurting badly and could use its own dose of nation-building.

Mr. Obama, in the face of these daunting realities, is said to be re-thinking his plans to ratchet up American involvement in Afghanistan. One can only hope.

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latimes.com
U.S. says Pakistan, Iran helping Taliban
Remarks from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, are the first in months on the sensitive issue.

By Greg Miller

September 22, 2009

Reporting from Washington

The U.S. military commander in Afghanistan says he has evidence that factions of Pakistani and Iranian spy services are supporting insurgent groups that carry out attacks on coalition troops.

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are being aided by "elements of some intelligence agencies," Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal wrote in a detailed analysis of the military situation delivered to the White House earlier this month.

McChrystal went on to single out Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency as well as the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as contributing to the external forces working to undermine U.S. interests and destabilize the government in Kabul.

The remarks reflect long-running U.S. concerns about Pakistan and Iran, but it is rare that they have been voiced so prominently by a top U.S. official. McChrystal submitted his assessment last month, and a declassified version was published Sunday on the Washington Post website.

The criticism of Pakistan is a particularly delicate issue because of the United States' close cooperation with Islamabad in pursuing militants and carrying out Predator airstrikes along the nation's rugged eastern border.

"Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan," McChrystal wrote, adding that senior leaders of the major Taliban groups are "reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI." The ISI has long-standing ties to the Taliban, but Pakistani officials have repeatedly claimed to have severed those relationships in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

More recently, the ISI has been a key U.S. partner in the capture of a number of high-level Al Qaeda operatives, including alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But U.S. officials have also complained of ongoing contacts between the spy service and Taliban groups.

U.S. frustration peaked last year when Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other U.S. officials secretly confronted Pakistan with evidence of ISI involvement in the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Since then, U.S. officials have sought to avoid public criticism of the Pakistani service as part of an effort to defuse tensions in the relationship. Indeed, U.S. officials in recent months have said that the ISI had become more committed to the counter-terrorism cause after one of the service's own facilities in Lahore was the target of a suicide bombing.

McChrystal's comments are the first public indication in months that the United States continues to see signs of ISI support for insurgent groups. Experts said elements of the ISI maintain those ties to hedge against a U.S. withdrawal from the region and rising Indian influence in Afghanistan.

"There is a mixture of motives and concerns within the ISI that have accounted for the dalliances that have gone on for years" with insurgent groups, said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA counter-terrorism official.

Iran has traditionally had an adversarial relationship with the Taliban, and McChrystal's report said that Tehran has played "an ambiguous role in Afghanistan," providing developmental assistance to the government even as it flirts with insurgent groups that target U.S. troops.

"The Iranian Quds Force is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups and providing other forms of military assistance to insurgents," McChrystal said in the report. The Quds Force is an elite wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that carries out operations in other countries.

McChrystal did not elaborate on the nature of the assistance, but Iran has been a transit point for foreign fighters entering Pakistan. Experts also cited evidence that Iran has provided training and technology in the use of roadside bombs.

U.S. intelligence officials said Iran appears to calibrate its involvement to tie down U.S. and coalition troops without provoking direct retaliation.

Iran's aim "is to make sure the U.S. is tied down and preoccupied in yet another theater," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "From Iran's point of view, it's an historical area of interest and too good an opportunity to pass up."

greg.miller@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan

By Bill Roggio
September 21, 2009 4:17 PM
Comments

Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan:

Adding to the frustration, according to officials in Kabul and Washington, are White House and Pentagon directives made over the last six weeks that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, not submit his request for as many as 45,000 additional troops because the administration isn't ready for it.

In the last two weeks, top administration leaders have suggested that more American troops will be sent to Afghanistan, and then called that suggestion "premature." Earlier this month, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "time is not on our side"; on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urged the public "to take a deep breath."

...

In Kabul, some members of McChrystal's staff said they don't understand why Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" but still hasn't given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly.

Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he'd stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.

"Yes, he'll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far," a senior official in Kabul said. "He'll hold his ground. He's not going to bend to political pressure."

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal's request, which was completed in late August. "We're working through the process by which we want that submitted," he said.

The entire process followed by the military in implementing a change of course in Afghanistan is far different, and bizarrely so, from the process it followed in changing strategy in Iraq.

For Afghanistan, the process to decide on a course change began in March of this year, when Bruce Reidel was tasked to assess the situation. This produced the much-heralded yet vague "AfPak" assessment. Then, in May, General David McKiernan was fired and replaced by General McChrystal, who took command in June. General McChrystal's assessment hit President Obama's desk at the end of August, almost three months after he took command. And yet now in the last half of September, the decision on additional forces has yet to be submitted to the administration.

Contrast this with Iraq in the fall of 2006. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fired just one day after the elections in early November. The Keane-Kagan plan for Iraq was submitted to President Bush shortly afterward, and encompassed both the assessment of the situation and the recommended course of action, including the recommended number of troops to be deployed to deal with the situation. General David Petraeus replaced General George Casey in early February 2007, and hit the ground running; the surge strategy was in place, troops were being mustered to deploy to Iraq, and commanders on the ground were preparing for and executing the new orders. The first of the surge units began to arrive in Iraq only weeks later, in March.

Today, the military is perceiving that the administration is punting the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and the military is even questioning the administration's commitment to succeed in Afghanistan. The leaking of the assessment and the report that McChrystal would resign if he is not given what is needed to succeed constitute some very public pushback against the administration's waffling on Afghanistan.

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Is there a 'Plan B' for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan?

* Story Highlights
* Debate heats up over whether more troops are needed in Afghanistan
* A top commander's leaked report suggests a troop increase needed
* Top Democratic leader suggests commander should testify before Congress
* Analyst says a troop increase in the region is not the only option

By Barbara Starr and Ed Hornick
CNN
updated 29 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a sign that President Obama is facing growing skepticism within his own party on Afghanistan, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Tuesday that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan should brief Congress on his recommendations for revising U.S military strategy.

"I think it is useful at some point in time for Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal to share with the Congress, both the Senate and the House, his views and his proposals and his sense of the success that change in strategy would have," Hoyer said Tuesday.

Leading Republicans recently called for McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus -- the U.S. commander in the Middle East and Central Asia -- to testify publicly about their recommendations.

Hoyer has so far declined to put a timeframe on when Congress should get the assessment.

Recently, McChrystal warned that more troops are needed there within the next year or the nearly 8-year-old war "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of a 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

"Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible," McChrystal said in the document.

The document was "leaked" to the newspaper, but parts were omitted after consultations between the newspaper and the Department of Defense, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

"While we would have much preferred none of this be made public at this time, we appreciate the paper's willingness to edit out those passages, which would likely have endangered personnel and operations in Afghanistan," Morrell said in a statement. He indicated that Defense Secretary Robert Gates doesn't think now is the right time for McChrystal to come back.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Michigan, echoed that thought late Tuesday afternoon.

"Sen. Levin has said that calling Gen. McChrystal, Gen. Petraeus, and Adm. Stavridis in to testify at this stage would be premature," his spokesperson said in a statement. "He has said that he will call military and civilian witnesses to testify before the committee once commanders in Afghanistan have made their recommendations, which they have not yet made, and after the recommendations have been reviewed by the chain of command."

Critics, though, have questioned whether Obama has deployed enough troops, or whether his strategy can contain rising violence and a resurgent Taliban.

For his part, the president has been considering the assessment of troop levels -- and the overall strategy in the region -- completed by McChrystal over the summer.

"Let's do a soup-to-nuts re-evaluation, focusing on what our original goal was, which was to get al Qaeda, the people who killed 3,000 Americans," Obama said on CNN's "State of the Union Sunday."

Obama said a review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan won't be driven "by the politics of the moment."

But as violence increases daily in Afghanistan, the calls for a major troop buildup are growing louder.

"If you are going to get the tribes over on your side and the side of government you have to have enough people there to make things happen for them economically, socially, and in terms of security," said retired Gen. Montgomery Meigs.

It's a plan that Afghan President Hamid Karzai supports.

The call for more U.S. soldiers is "the right approach ... and we back it," Karzai said during an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

The United States now has about 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with NATO and other allies contributing about 35,000 more.

Some observers have said attacking al Qaeda is fundamentally a counterterrorism strategy -- requiring a limited number of new troops. It's the Plan B strategy advocated by some in the White House according to a senior pentagon official.

"The last thing Afghanistan needs is for us to increase troops and then run out the door again," said Rory Stewart, the director of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights. "We've seen a lot of boom and bust. It needs a patient, long-term relationship."

Levin has said adding more U.S. troops right away is not the only answer.

"I've been recommending to the president that, first of all, before any consideration is made of additional combat forces, that we get the Afghan army bigger, better equipped," he said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." VideoWatch more of Levin's approach to Afghanistan »

But no matter what is decided, the bottom line is: support for the war is declining in the United States and both the president and his commander will have to make the case for whatever comes next.

CNN International Correspondent Michael Ware, who has covered Afghanistan extensively, said it's time for the president to "man up."

"Is he going to fight this war or is he going to oversee an American defeat?" he said.

Obama needs to put more troops on the ground, build up Afghan forces, Ware said. He also needs the Afghan government to reach out to old warlords to "draw upon the tribal forces."

"These people will be able to fill the vacuum," he said. "If you put a local warlord or tribal leader in command of his area, you give him the money to pay his troops and to arm them, you put them in their interest, there will be no Taliban in that area. And if there are, they'll be dead."

But the president faces not only growing strategy issue, but also selling the war to an ever-increasing skeptical American public.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released on September 15 indicated that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission.

Support is down from 53 percent in April, marking the lowest level since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

CNN congressional producer Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.

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Bond: Obama has "buyer's remorse" on Afghanistan

Missouri Sen. Kit Bond today called on General Stanley McChrystal to testify before Congress following news reports that the Administration has delayed the Commander’s request for additional troops.

Bond is the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"After asking for General McChrystal’s Afghanistan assessment, it now appears President Obama has buyer’s remorse," said Bond.

"Congress needs to hear directly from General McChrystal to ensure political motivations here in Washington don’t override the needs of our commanders on the ground."

In a news release, Bond's office added:

This latest news that the Administration is delaying General McChrystal’s troop request compounds concerns raised by the President’s recent comments.

Bond, who has been one of the strongest supporters of the Administration’s new strategy in Afghanistan, was disturbed by the President’s suggestion this past Sunday that he is reconsidering the American commitment to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Bond reminded the Administration that in March, the President announced a new, comprehensive approach to the war in Afghanistan – a fully resourced counter-insurgency campaign.

The troops in the field have been waiting over 6 months for the President to follow through on his promise. As General McChrystal’s recently leaked assessment points out, time is of the essence, and we can’t afford for the President to continue to stall on this vital national security issue.

The Senator urged the President not to abandon General McChrystal’s strategy for success for a failing counter-terrorism-only strategy. Bond pointed out that for years, the United States and international forces have tried the under-resourced CT-only approach with no success.

Submitted by Steve Kraske on September 22, 2009 - 3:33pm

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The beginning of the end in Afghanistan: The disappearing act headlining this week’s three ring circus

Tue, 09/22/2009 - 3:46pm



This week is a three ring circus for the international community. The U.N. The G20. The Clinton Global Initiative ... and a host of other side shows for good measure. But with most of the activities featuring little more than the foreign policy equivalent of jazz hands ... eye-catching moves amounting to much ado about nothing ... it may ultimately be remembered for a reason no one saw coming. Because I think it is pretty likely that in the future we will look at this week as the beginning of the end of America's presence in Afghanistan and by extension, George W. Bush's 8-year involvement in the Middle East.

It will take some time to wind things down. I also think history may come up with some better name to describe the Bush war in the context of related wars that took place before it, during his father's time in office, and will almost certainly take place after it. Perhaps it will be seen as the Second Gulf War in a series of several. Perhaps it will be seen as the Second Oil War. But we can leave the lasting labels to historians.

The reality is that the reaction to the leak of the McChrystal Report is indicative that there are really only two options in Afghanistan open to the administration. One is that they do not provide McChrystal with the additional resources he requests and they further narrow his mission as a justification for their decision and we begin an inevitable process of winding down. The second is that Obama does grant McChrystal's request but due to the growing doubts about the entire endeavor that the leak of the report has both revealed and exacerbated, that he sets much more specific goals and timelines that in turn pre-sage an ultimate winding down.

The Vietnam analogy is sticking -- the quagmire paradigm -- and no one near the President wants making that mistake again to be his legacy. The fact that Karzai's regime is turning out to be just as corrupt and feckless as our partners in South Vietnam were doesn't help. Further, as we approach the 10 year point at which Russia ended its occupation (which we'll hit in less than two years), comparisons with yet another futile military effort will become too strong for many to bear. Finally, of course, there is the small fact that we're playing whack-a-mole with the insurgents, we can't close the backdoor to Pakistan and if we could, they would go someplace else in the world. In fact, they already are whether to Yemen or Somalia or, apparently, to Colorado.

The seemingly serious threat posed by an Afghan-led terror group associated with al Qaeda that wanted to use explosives to attack U.S. transport hubs underscores two other important points. One is that as we squeeze Afghanistan we may crush some opponents but we do create new ones. Further, it is also clear that we really need to do some new thinking about how one actually does reduce the risk of terror attacks ... and accept that effective homeland security enforcement as apparently has taken place this week, may be the best front line on which we can prosecute this effort.

Meanwhile, of course, in New York and later in Pittsburgh, the headlines that were hoped for from the three-ring circus are unlikely to be materializing ... and the ones that do emerge are likely to be rather disheartening or, at best, underwhelming.

The United States is likely to frustrate the world by providing it with just what it has been asking for. On climate, on the business of the U.N., at the G20 meeting, America will be the key player but it will not dominate or direct or make the tough calls. It will be a better partner than at any time in the recent past. But the result is a three ring circus without a ringmaster. And paradoxically, the United States will be (is being) fiercely criticized for not being strong enough. We can call the world hypocrites all we want but the reality is that everyone wants the same thing: a leader who will take the heat and always lead in the direction they want to go. Any deviation from this ideal will produce howls ... and reading the news this week should produce plenty of corroboration for this observation.

For the Obama administration, the problem is not being an America we can never be. Every girl sooner or later (it always happens around her 29th birthday if the girl's still single), realize that Prince Charming is a myth and must settle for a real man. But when they do, they then want that man to have some demonstrable qualities and being better than the last jerk you dated only gets you so far. For Obama though, the world is looking for proof that he can actually deliver on one or more of his international priorities: make engagement work with Iran, embrace a new approach to Israel and Palestine that actually produces results, refocus to AfPak and make that work, get our leadership on with regard to climate, be a better neighbor in the hemisphere, jettison tired old artifacts of policies (see: Cuba), help foster real reform and new levels of cooperation and transparency in international markets, and reduce the threat of WMD proliferation.

One by one these issues will play in one or another of the three rings that makes this week's foreign policy circus so compelling. The Obama team is hoping there will be signs of progress ... but that seems unlikely. Taken together, the United States may end up being seen as the absent ringmaster not because we have chosen a different style of leadership but simply because we can't deliver. Sometimes this will be because circumstances truly are beyond our control and America doesn't have the influence or options that others ascribe to us. Sometimes it may be because we ourselves promised more than we could deliver. Obama's credibility is at stake ... and given the way most of the issues listed above are trending, regaining it is going to be a challenge that could take a long, long time to address.

As with Afghanistan, here's the secret: resetting expectations. Identify some goals you can actually achieve. Achieve them. That should have been the approach to domestic policy. Go slower. Build up a head of steam. And it needs to be the approach to international policy. Ringmaster or not, in the three ring circus of international affairs, the last place Obama wants to be is with his predecessor and many of his critics in a clown car full of people the world no longer takes seriously.

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September 23, 2009
Obama Considers Strategy Shift in Afghan War

By PETER BAKER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
Comments

WASHINGTON — President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, one official said.

The sweeping reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants.

In looking at other options, aides said Mr. Obama might ultimately just be testing assumptions — and assuring liberals in his own party that he was not rushing into a further expansion of the war — before ultimately agreeing to the anticipated troop request from General McChrystal. But the review suggests the president is having second thoughts about how deeply to engage in an intractable eight-year conflict that is not going well.

Though Mr. Obama says he believes that a stable Afghanistan is central to the security of the United States, some advisers said he was also wary of becoming trapped in an overseas quagmire. Some Pentagon officials say they worry that he is having what they called “buyer’s remorse” after ordering an extra 21,000 troops there within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.

Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing through the situation, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. “There are a lot of competing views,” said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said Mr. Biden had proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.

The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.

Mr. Obama rejected Mr. Biden’s approach in March, and it is not clear that it has more traction this time. But the fact that is on the table again speaks to the breadth of the administration’s review and the evolving views inside the White House of what has worked in the region and what has not. In recent days, officials have expressed satisfaction with the results of their cooperation with Pakistan in hunting down Qaeda figures in the unforgiving border lands.

A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head. The strategy Mr. Obama adopted in March concluded that to defeat Al Qaeda, the United States needs to keep the Taliban from returning to power in Afghanistan and making it a safe haven once again for Osama bin Laden’s network. Mr. Biden’s position questions that assumption.

Mrs. Clinton, who opposed Mr. Biden in March, appeared to refer to this debate in an interview on Monday night on PBS. “Some people say, ‘Well, Al Qaeda’s no longer in Afghanistan,’ ” she said. “If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can’t tell you how fast Al Qaeda would be back in Afghanistan.”

At the time he announced his new approach, Mr. Obama described it as “a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy,” and said “to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you.” The administration then fired the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, and replaced him with General McChrystal, empowering him to carry out the new strategy.

But the Afghan presidential elections, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.

“A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That’s in doubt now,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration’s strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. “Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election.”

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent Mr. Obama a six-page letter arguing the case for more troops for General McChrystal. “There is no strategy short of a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign that is likely to provide lasting security,” he wrote.

Mr. Obama now has to reconcile past statements and policy with his current situation.

“The problem for President Obama is he has made the case in the past that we took our eye off the ball and we should have stayed in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. But now that he is in charge of the war, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Obama is discovering “he doesn’t have much in the way of options” and time is of the essence.

He added, “The longer you wait, the harder it will be to reverse it.”

Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

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Paper no. 3433
27-Sep-2009
OBAMA'S AF-PAK TROIKA FAILS TO DELIVER

By B.Raman



US policy-makers had hoped that the taking-over of Gen. David Petraeus as the commander of the US Central Command, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the US Commander in Afghanistan working under Gen.Petraeus would bring about a more proactive strategy to weaken the Taliban and create a divide between it and the Afghan people. The two had earned a reputation in Iraq for reversing the fortunes of Al Qaeda and the former Baathist soldiers of Saddam Hussein, creating a divide between the two and enlisting the support of different tribal leaders and through them their followers for the US military operations. The improvement in the ground situation in Iraq----though not yet irreversible--- was largely due to their thinking, planning and execution.

2. Hopes in Washington that the two Generals would bring about similar results in Afghanistan have been belied so far.The Af-Pak troika of the administration of Barack Obama---- Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special representative for the Af-Pak region, who handles the political and diplomatic angles, and the two Generals--- has not been able to come to grips with the problem almost six months after the new Af-Pak policy of the Obama adminstration was launched in March last. The present ground situation favours the Pakistan-based Neo Taliban. Since the two Generals took over, the Neo Taliban has been able to increase and strengthen its presence in the north too. The situation is still one of a bleeding stalemate, but the prospects of the US-led forces breaking the stalemate and prevailing over the Neo Taliban are not any the brighter since the two Generals took over.

3. The dilemma posed by the worrisome ground situation is reflected in the growing impression that Obama's Af-Pak strategy has failed to take off and is unlikely to take off and that the time has come to think of a new strategy in which the key to success would be in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan.Vice-President Joe Biden seems to favour a change of focus from a Neo Taliban-centric strategy in Afghanistan to an Al Qaeda-centric one in Pakistan.

4.Presently, the political pressure is on Pakistan to act against the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements operating from sanctuaries in its territory and on the Hamid Karzai Government in Kabul to improve governance, reduce corruption and pay better attention to the problems of the people in the areas controlled by the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the US-led Western forces.

5. Neither of these pressures has worked. Nor have the never-ending incentives offered by the US to Pakistan---the latest of which is the expected passage by both Houses of the US Congress of the Kerry-Lugar Bill making a long term commitment of US$ 7.5 billion to Pakistan in the form of non-military aid over a period of five years. The military aid, which too continues to increase, will be in addition. Original expectations when Obama assumed office in January last that strict benchmarks would be laid down for the periodic disbursements of this aid in order to ensure that Pakistan does act sincerely and firmly against the terrorists have been belied.The more Pakistan is pampered, the less it acts against the terrorists. That has been the lesson since 9/11 and this lesson has not been learnt by the officials of the Obama administration.This is evident even from the grim Assessment dated August 30,2009, prepared by Gen.McChrystal, on the basis of which he is reported to be planning to ask for another surge of 21000 US troops--- a request over which Obama is reportedly not enthusiastic.

6. The pressures on Karzai to improve governance have not worked either. This is partly due to the difficult ground situation, which would pose a dilemma to any ruler---however democratic and however competent. Moreover, instead of strengthening the position of Karzai, US officials have done everything to weaken his credibility in the eyes of his own people as well as the international community through allegations---some true, many unwisely inspired--- regarding his inability or unwillingness to act against corruption and narcotics production and rigging in the Presidential elections. Even if he wins the elections in the first round itself----as he is expected to--- the importance of that victory has already been diluted by these allegations. US officials take a lot of care not to say or do anything, which might weaken the position of the Pakistani leadership, but they do not take similar care in respect of Karzai.

7.In the existing gloomy scenario, there are only two positive factors, which provide some cheer. Firstly, the improvement in the flow of human intelligence to the US intelligence community from sources in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, which has led to some significant sucesses in the form of eradication of some middle-level leaders of Al Qaeda and even senior leaders of the Pakistan Taliban known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) by US drone strikes. After having eliminated Baitullah Mehsud, the Amir of the TTP, the Drone strikes are now focussed on eliminating the Haqqani network consisting of the old Soviet era mujahideen warrior Jalaluddin Haqqani and his sons. If the US succeeds in eliminating the Haqqani network--- I hope it will--- the pressure on the US forces in Afghan territory could lessen--- at least in the short term. As against this, the impact of the elimination of Baitullah on the ground situation in Afghanistan would be minimal. His elimination was more a boon to the Pakistani security forces grappling with terrorists of their own creation in their territory than to the US-led Western forces in Afghanistan.

8.The second positive factor is the role of India as a force for stability in Afghanistan. Any objective analyst has to concede that the various road construction, democracy-promotion and people-oriented programmes undertaken by India in the areas controlled by the Government of Afghanistan have benefitted not only the people of Afghanistan immensely, but also the long-term Western objective of a democratic, modern Afghanistan.

9. One would have expected the US policy-makers not only to recognise the importance of retaining the role of India as a force for stability, but also encouraging India to expand further its people-oriented role in Afghanistan. In his assessment, McChrystal recognises --- though somewhat grudgingly-- the beneficial role of India and the support for that role from the Karzai Government, but one is surprised to find that he shows understanding for the Pakistani concerns over India's role and hints that these concerns have to be taken into consideration while formulating any revised strategy. He himself says that no strategy will work unless it is people-oriented, but at the same time wants something to be done to address Pakistani concerns over India's people-oriented role.

10.The Afghan people---whether Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbecks or others--- distrust and hate the Pakistanis after seeing the role played by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the creation and fattening of the Taliban since 1994. One saw the extent of the hatred for the Pakistanis when the American and Northern Alliance troops entered Kabul in 2001 under Operation Enduring Freedom. Pakistanis assisting the Taliban Government in Kabul were hunted, killed and their dead bodies thrown into the gutters of Kabul.

11. Gen.McChrystal's ideas, if implemented, would provide an environment for the re-assertion of the hated Pakistani role by paying attention to Pakistani concerns over India's positive role.This shows how short-sighted US policy-makers and military-officers can be.The General's assessment is disappointing because it fails to put its finger on the crux of the dilemma being faced by the US-led Western forces, similar to the dilemma which the Soviet troops faced in Afghanistan in the 1980s before they decided to quit in 1988.This dilemma arose in the case of the Soviet troops and has now arisen in the case of the US-led Western troops from the absence of a counter-sanctuaries component to the counter-insurgency strategy.

12.The reluctance of the Soviet troops to take their fighting to the sanctuaries of the Afghan Mujahideen in Pakistani territory led to a situation where the Soviet troops kept bleeding till battle fatigue and public disenchantment with the war set in. Similarly, the absence of an effective counter-sanctuaries component is leading to a situation where the US and other Western forces as well as the ANA are bleeding more and more. There are already the incipient signs of a battle fatigue as cound be seen even from the General's assessment and the beginning of a public disenchantment with the involvement in Afghanistan. This disenchantment is already pronounced in West Europe and Canada and one could see the beginning of it even in the US. Instead of allowing the Neo Taliban to infiltrate in increasing numbers from its sanctuaries and recruiting grounds in the FATA and the Pashtun majority areas of Balochistan and then fighting or countering their ambushes in Afghan territory, the US should take its counter-insurgency operations to the camps of the Neo Taliban in adjoining Pakistani territory----whether in the FATA or in Balochistan.

13. The US already has an air-mounted counter-sanctuaries strategy in the FATA with the help of the Drones, which provide a deniable way of hitting at the sanctuaries of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Neo Taliban. This strategy has had its successes, but, despite them, has proved inadequate. Initially, these strikes were concentrated on the sanctuaries of Al Qaeda and its allies in North Waziristan. Earlier this year, when there was a danger of the TTP expanding its presence to the non-tribal areas and posing a danger to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, the focus of the Drone strikes shifted to South Waziristan against the sanctuaries of the TTP.During the last six months or so, the objective of these strikes became not protecting the NATO forces and the ANA in Afghanistan from attacks mounted from the Pakistani territory, but assisting the Pakistan Army in reversing the advance of the TTP into the non-tribal areas. After killing Baitullah in the first week of August, the US has again changed the direction and is now focussing on the Haqqani network, whose threat is more in Afghan territory than in the FATA. The US has not been able to mount a full-scale operation against Al Qaeda sanctuaries in North Waziristan due to the dispersal of its resources to South Waziristan for use against the TTP.

14. Even this limited success has not been there against the staging grounds of the Neo Taliban in Balochistan.The US continues to depend on the Pakistan Army for action against the sanctuaries of the Neo Taliban. The ISI-sponsored Neo Taliban is the only asset left with the Pakistan Army for regaining its primacy in Afghanistan if and when the US and other Western troops leave Afghanistan. Pakistan wants to regain this primacy without the direct deployment of its own army as it did in the 1990s. If the US is waiting for the Pakistan Army to act against the Neo Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistani territory, this is not going to happen. The US has only two alternatives---either itself act against the sanctuaries in Balochistan and destroy the Neo Taliban leadership in order to restore the damaged image of the US forces in Afghanistan, thereby paving the way for an honourable exit or keep its operations confined to Afghan territory, thereby continuing to bleed and face the prospect of an exit forced on the US by the Neo Taliban under humiliating conditions.

15.The role of the Drones---even if extended to Balochistan-- may not be as effective as their role in the FATA. The places in the FATA where the sanctuaries of Al Qaeda,the TTP and the Haqqani network are located are far from inhabited areas. The dangers of civilian fatalities are not large. In the Quetta and adjoining areas of Balochistan, the sanctuaries of the Neo Taliban are located in inhabited areas. It would be very difficult---almost impossible---to avoid large civilian fatalities. Deniable ground operations would, therefore, be necessary to eliminate the sanctuaries of the Neo Taliban. The US has the capability for such ground operations, but does not have the political will to use it lest it add to the already high anti-US feelings in Pakistan and affect even the limited co-operration which it has presently been getting from Pakistan in the FATA.

16. This danger of adverse reaction in Pakistan has to be faced if the US wants to bring about better ground conditions, which would enable it to contemplate withdrawing from Afghanistan with honour and with some confidence that Afghanistan will not revert to its pre-9/11 position of being the rear base for Al Qaeda. Before contemplating withdrawal, the US has to destroy Al Qaeda sanctuaries, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the FATA, the Haqqani network and the Neo Taliban sanctuaries in Balochistan. It has to come to terms with the hard reality that this is something which the US has to do without depending on Pakistan.Pakistan and Al Qaeda are biding their time hoping that after the US withdrawal, they can move into Afghanistan once again. This should not be allowed to happen.

17. Instead of discussing the various options available in this regard,McChrystal's report skirts the crux of the dilemma and discusses other issues having little relevance to a counter-sanctuaries strategy. His assessment reads more like one prepared by a senior officer attending a joint staff course than a recommendation for action prepared by an officer in charge of command and control. It is possible there is a classified part of the Assessment in which McChrystal discusses a counter-sanctuaries strategy. If not, his thinking doesn't bode well for the ultimate success of the US operations in the Af-Pak region.

18. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier paper of May 13,2009, titled "The Af-Pak Situation--An Update", at
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/pap...paper3186.html (27-9-09)

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail:
seventyone2@gmail.com )

[Beetle]

I see fear in Obozo's eyes.

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Obama's Move: Iran and Afghanistan

September 28, 2009 | 1849 GMT

By George Friedman

Related Special Topic Page

* The Iranian Nuclear Game

During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, now-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said that like all U.S. presidents, Barack Obama would face a foreign policy test early in his presidency if elected. That test is now here.

His test comprises two apparently distinct challenges, one in Afghanistan and one in Iran. While different problems, they have three elements in common. First, they involve the question of his administration’s overarching strategy in the Islamic world. Second, the problems are approaching decision points (and making no decision represents a decision here). And third, they are playing out very differently than Obama expected during the 2008 campaign.

During the campaign, Obama portrayed the Iraq war as a massive mistake diverting the United States from Afghanistan, the true center of the “war on terror.” He accordingly promised to shift the focus away from Iraq and back to Afghanistan. Obama’s views on Iran were more amorphous. He supported the doctrine that Iran should not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, while at the same time asserted that engaging Iran was both possible and desirable. Embedded in the famous argument over whether offering talks without preconditions was appropriate (something now-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked him for during the Democratic primary) was the idea that the problem with Iran stemmed from Washington’s refusal to engage in talks with Tehran.

We are never impressed with campaign positions, or with the failure of the victorious candidate to live up to them. That’s the way American politics work. But in this case, these promises have created a dual crisis that Obama must make decisions about now.

Iran

Back in April, in the midst of the financial crisis, Obama reached an agreement at the G-8 meeting that the Iranians would have until Sept. 24 and the G-20 meeting to engage in meaningful talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P-5+1) or face intensely increased sanctions. His administration was quite new at the time, so the amount of thought behind this remains unclear. On one level, the financial crisis was so intense and September so far away that Obama and his team probably saw this as a means to delay a secondary matter while more important fires were flaring up.

But there was more operating than that. Obama intended to try to bridge the gap between the Islamic world and the United States between April and September. In his speech to the Islamic world from Cairo, he planned to show a desire not only to find common ground, but also to acknowledge shortcomings in U.S. policy in the region. With the appointment of special envoys George Mitchell (for Israel and the Palestinian territories) and Richard Holbrooke (for Pakistan and Afghanistan), Obama sought to build on his opening to the Islamic world with intense diplomatic activity designed to reshape regional relationships.

It can be argued that the Islamic masses responded positively to Obama’s opening — it has been asserted to be so and we will accept this — but the diplomatic mission did not solve the core problem. Mitchell could not get the Israelis to move on the settlement issue, and while Holbrooke appears to have made some headway on increasing Pakistan’s aggressiveness toward the Taliban, no fundamental shift has occurred in the Afghan war.

Most important, no major shift has occurred in Iran’s attitude toward the United States and the P-5+1 negotiating group. In spite of Obama’s Persian New Year address to Iran, the Iranians did not change their attitude toward the United States. The unrest following Iran’s contested June presidential election actually hardened the Iranian position. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained president with the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while the so-called moderates seemed powerless to influence their position. Perceptions that the West supported the demonstrations have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s hand further, allowing him to paint his critics as pro-Western and himself as an Iranian nationalist.

But with September drawing to a close, talks have still not begun. Instead, they will begin Oct. 1. And last week, the Iranians chose to announce that not only will they continue work on their nuclear program (which they claim is not for military purposes), they have a second, hardened uranium enrichment facility near Qom. After that announcement, Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy held a press conference saying they have known about the tunnel for several months, and warned of stern consequences.

This, of course, raises the question of what consequences. Obama has three choices in this regard.

First, he can impose crippling sanctions against Iran. But that is possible only if the Russians cooperate. Moscow has the rolling stock and reserves to supply all of Iran’s fuel needs if it so chooses, and Beijing can also remedy any Iranian fuel shortages. Both Russia and China have said they don’t want sanctions; without them on board, sanctions are meaningless.

Second, Obama can take military action against Iran, something easier politically and diplomatically for the United States to do itself rather than rely on Israel. By itself, Israel cannot achieve air superiority, suppress air defenses, attack the necessary number of sites and attempt to neutralize Iranian mine-laying and anti-ship capability all along the Persian Gulf. Moreover, if Israel struck on its own and Iran responded by mining the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would be drawn into at least a naval war with Iran — and probably would have to complete the Israeli airstrikes, too.

And third, Obama could choose to do nothing (or engage in sanctions that would be the equivalent of doing nothing). Washington could see future Iranian nuclear weapons as an acceptable risk. But the Israelis don’t, meaning they would likely trigger the second scenario. It is possible that the United States could try to compel Israel not to strike — though it’s not clear whether Israel would comply — something that would leave Obama publicly accepting Iran’s nuclear program.

And this, of course, would jeopardize Obama’s credibility. It is possible for the French or Germans to waffle on this issue; no one is looking to them for leadership. But for Obama simply to acquiesce to Iranian nuclear weapons, especially at this point, would have significant diplomatic and domestic political ramifications. Simply put, Obama would look weak — and that, of course, is why the Iranians announced the second nuclear site. They read Obama as weak, and they want to demonstrate their own resolve. That way, if the Russians were thinking of cooperating with the United States on sanctions, Moscow would be seen as backing the weak player against the strong one. The third option, doing nothing, therefore actually represents a significant action.

Afghanistan

In a way, the same issue is at stake in Afghanistan. Having labeled Afghanistan as critical — indeed, having campaigned on the platform that the Bush administration was fighting the wrong war — it would be difficult for Obama to back down in Afghanistan. At the same time, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has reported that without a new strategy and a substantial increase in troop numbers, failure in Afghanistan is likely.

The number of troops being discussed, 30,000-40,000, would bring total U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to just above the number of troops the Soviet Union deployed there in its war (just under 120,000) — a war that ended in failure. The new strategy being advocated would be one in which the focus would not be on the defeat of the Taliban by force of arms, but the creation of havens for the Afghan people and protecting those havens from the Taliban.

A move to the defensive when time is on your side is not an unreasonable strategy. But it is not clear that time is on Western forces’ side. Increased offensives are not weakening the Taliban. But halting attacks and assuming that the Taliban will oblige the West by moving to the offensive, thereby opening itself to air and artillery strikes, probably is not going to happen. And while assuming that the country will effectively rise against the Taliban out of the protected zones the United States has created is interesting, it does not strike us as likely. The Taliban is fighting the long war because it has nowhere else to go. Its ability to maintain military and political cohesion following the 2001 invasion has been remarkable. And betting that the Pakistanis will be effective enough to break the Taliban’s supply lines is hardly the most prudent bet.

In short, Obama’s commander on the ground has told him the current Afghan strategy is failing. He has said that unless that strategy changes, more troops won’t help, and that a change of strategy will require substantially more troops. But when we look at the proposed strategy and the force levels, it is far from obvious that even that level of commitment will stand a chance of achieving meaningful results quickly enough before the forces of Washington’s NATO allies begin to withdraw and U.S. domestic resolve erodes further.

Obama has three choices in Afghanistan. He can continue to current strategy and force level, hoping to prolong failure long enough for some undefined force to intervene. He can follow McChrystal’s advice and bet on the new strategy. Or he can withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Once again, doing nothing — the first option — is doing something quite significant.

The Two Challenges Come Together

The two crises intermingle in this way: Every president is tested in foreign policy, sometimes by design and sometimes by circumstance. Frequently, this happens at the beginning of his term as a result of some problem left by his predecessor, a strategy adopted in the campaign or a deliberate action by an antagonist. How this happens isn’t important. What is important is that Obama’s test is here. Obama at least publicly approached the presidency as if many of the problems the United States faced were due to misunderstandings about or the thoughtlessness of the United States. Whether this was correct is less important than that it left Obama appearing eager to accommodate his adversaries rather than confront them.

No one has a clear idea of Obama’s threshold for action.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban takes the view that the British and Russians left, and that the Americans will leave, too. We strongly doubt that the force level proposed by McChrystal will be enough to change their minds. Moreover, U.S. forces are limited, with many still engaged in Iraq. In any case, it isn’t clear what force level would suffice to force the Taliban to negotiate or capitulate — and we strongly doubt that there is a level practical to contemplate.

In Iran, Ahmadinejad clearly perceives that challenging Obama is low-risk and high reward. If he can finally demonstrate that the United States is unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations, his own domestic situation improves dramatically, his relationship with the Russians deepens, and most important, his regional influence — and menace — surges. If Obama accepts Iranian nukes without serious sanctions or military actions, the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically. The Arab states in the region rely on the United States to protect them from Iran, so U.S. acquiescence in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches.

There are four permutations Obama might choose in response to the dual crisis. He could attack Iran and increase forces in Afghanistan, but he might well wind up stuck in a long-term war in Afghanistan. He could avoid that long-term war by withdrawing from Afghanistan and also ignore Iran’s program, but that would leave many regimes reliant on the United States for defense against Iran in the lurch. He could increase forces in Afghanistan and ignore Iran — probably yielding the worst of all possible outcomes, namely, a long-term Afghan war and an Iran with a nuclear program if not nuclear weapons.

On pure logic, history or politics aside, the best course is to strike Iran and withdraw from Afghanistan. That would demonstrate will in the face of a significant challenge while perhaps reshaping Iran and certainly avoiding a drawn-out war in Afghanistan. Of course, it is easy for those who lack power and responsibility — and the need to govern — to provide logical choices. But the forces closing in on Obama are substantial, and there are many competing considerations in play.

Presidents eventually arrive at the point where something must be done, and where doing nothing is very much doing something. At this point, decisions no longer can be postponed, and each choice involves significant risk. Obama has reached that point, and significantly, in his case, he faces a double choice. And any decision he makes will reverberate.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com

[Beetle]

U.S. commander in Afghanistan talked with Obama only once

The military general credited with capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says he has spoken with President Obama only once since taking command in Afghanistan.

"I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconference]," Gen. Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

"You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?" Mr. Martin followed up.
"That is correct," the general replied.

This revelation comes amid the explosive publication of an classified report written by the general that said the war in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure" if more troops are not added next year. Yet, the debate over health care reform continues to dominate Washington’s political discussions. On Monday, the White House announced President Obama would travel to Denmark to lobby the International Olympic Committee to select his hometown of Chicago for the 2012 summer games.

Former U.S. Ambassador for the United Nations John R. Bolton said the lack of communication with the general was indicative of Mr. Obama’s misplaced priorities.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblo...ed-to-obama-o/

Hey, give Obozo a break. He is busy pushing a commie socialist agenda on us. He don't have time to worry about a silly war were people are dieing. geesh

I see it like the General. A good organization looks at their watch when they are ask to do something. A bad organization looks at their calendar. We have boots on the ground and a commander and cheif who is dragging his ass. That is BS and we should impeach the traitor for subverting our Troops in theater.

May I add that pulling out is not an option right now. When Russia pulled out of Afghanistan, the taliban took over and we know what happened next. If we pull out, what assures us that the taliban wont take over again? This guy is a detriment to our National Security. He should be concerned with getting our Troops what they need. He shouldn't be pushing a commie agenda that the people really don't want.