The report about Patrick Moon announcing that the State Department intends to take Mullah Omar off the terrorist blacklist seemed to originate the Iran media—not a paragon of accuracy--and quickly ran around the world.
The piece said:
WASHINGTON: The US agrees to drop the name of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar from the terror list ahead of talks with the insurgents, an official says.
“US intends to remove Mullah Omar from the black list in a bid to provide a suitable seedbed for holding contacts with the Taliban,” said, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick S Moon. Moon added that during his upcoming visit to Kabul, he will fully support the idea of negotiated settlement with the Taliban militants to end the violence in the region. He also reiterated that the talks with the Taliban insurgents were possible within the Afghan Constitution, Press TV reported.
Press TV is the Iranian English-language media outlet.
But there is some basis. Possibly, Iranian journalists engaged in some imaginative embroidery of a report from AFP covering Moon’s remarks on October 23:
Asked if talks could encompass Taliban leader Mullah Mohamed Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of another radical faction, who are both on a US blacklist, Moon said such men would be dealt with on a “case by case basis”.
“Mullah Omar has been a very outspoken, very violent opponent of the people of Afghanistan,” he said.
On October 30, the Pentagon poured cold water over the possibility of Mullah Omar joining the negotiation process (emphasis added):
Q Would U.S. support for these types of contacts initiated by the Afghans hold even if it was Mullah Omar?
MR. MORRELL: This question's been asked and answered a thousand times. No, we are not talking about reconciling with Mullah Omar. I don't think we -- listen, but ultimately this is the Afghan government who has to make determinations of these things.
We as a government do not believe that Mullah Omar is somebody you reconcile with. Mullah Omar has the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands, based upon the support that he provided Osama bin Laden. So we do not reconcile with al Qaeda.
We are talking about reconciling with insurgents within Afghanistan, not foreign fighters, but insurgents within Afghanistan.
…
Q I wanted to follow up on Jim's question about Mullah Omar. What part of Taliban do you think you can do reconciliation with?
MR. MORRELL: I'm not going to go through a list of who you can reconcile and who you can't reconcile.
I think Mullah Omar, who provided a safe haven and a base from which Osama bin Laden could train terrorists, who eventually killed thousands of Americans, is not somebody we're prepared to reconcile with.
Yeah.
Clearly, the United States has no appetite for Mullah Omar. But the argument that Mullah Omar—who actually ran the country as the Commander of the Faithful when it was Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—is a “foreign fighter” (or, in Mr. Moon's words, "an opponent of the people of Afghanistan") and therefore not a suitable interlocutor in Afghan affairs simply isn’t going to hold water.
Note that the denunciation is couched grudgingly in the terms that it’s up to the Afghan government. And Hamed Karzai has already guaranteed Mullah Omar’s safety if he joins the talks.
Pakistan’s top media outlet, Dawn, reported on October 4:
In an exclusive interview to Geo television channel, Karzai said, “Through Pakistan television channel Geo I propose Mullah Omar to get back to Afghanistan as I will be wholly and solely responsible for his security and I shall be answerable to the whole of the world on his behalf.”
Indeed, the Karzai government has been inviting Mullah Omar to join talks as far back as 2005—and the DoD has been slapping them down just as long.
So, I would imagine the situation is that the DoD doesn’t want Mullah Omar involved, never wanted him involved, and in the past, when military victory and the destruction of the Taliban were the order of the day, the awkward fact of Karzai wanting to negotiate with Mullah Omar could be swept under the rug--and dutifully ignored by the Western media.
But now that the negotiation track is opening up, what DoD wants doesn’t automatically go.
The State Department, with the task of dealing with the Karzai government, understands that if the Afghans insist that Mullah Omar be involved in the reconciliation process it is difficult for the United States to refuse to provide its support—which would presumably involve an undertaking by the United States not to bundle Mullah Omar onto a helicopter for trial at Guantanamo or the United States if he came out of hiding i.e. taking him off the blacklist.
To give an idea of the gathering strength of the negotiation track, Pakistan’s hardline nationalist newspaper, The Pakistan Daily, provided this account of incendiary remarks by the guy who runs the North West Frontier Provinces, Pakistan's front line in dealing with the Pashtun insurgency and Taliban safe havens. Note the rather pointed observation that, if there's any Pakistan leader who has a weak local base and relies on foreign power for his clout, it's Karzai and not Mullah Omar.
Owais Ghani, who governs the North West Frontier Province and its adjoining tribal areas, is the most prominent figure to date to publicly advocate holding talks with militant commanders leading the insurgency against coalition forces in Afghanistan.
"They have to talk to Mullah Omar, certainly – not maybe, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani group," Mr Ghani told The Daily Telegraph in an interview in Peshawar.
"The solution, the bottom line, is that political stability will only come to Afghanistan when all political power groups, irrespective of the length of their beard, are given their just due share in the political dispensation in Afghanistan."
…
Mr. Ghani said that all three militant commanders (Mullah Omar, Hekmatyar, and Haqqani—ed). were in Afghanistan.
"They are a power group that has to be preserved to seek political solutions. We would not destroy them because then you are contributing to further instability," he said. He denied that Pakistan "wants the Taliban back". He added: "No sir, we have no favorites in Afghanistan."
Mr. Ghani said that West must accept that the "Mullah is a political reality".
…
Mr Ghani said: "You are headed for failure. I think Afghanistan is practically lost. It is compounding our problems."
The governor added that the West must hold talks with the Taliban as al-Qaeda was regrouping from Iraq to Afghanistan. Russia had begun to supply weapons to militants and that the Afghans were intolerant of foreigners on their soil and so were staging "a national uprising".
"To eliminate the Taliban you have to slaughter half the Afghan nation," said Mr Ghani.
…
Mr. Ghani said that Mr. Karzai "does not represent any power group – tribal, religious or political and therefore like the people in his government he is dependant on foreign power. He is therefore an obstacle to dialogue and peace."
He described Pakistan's military strategy as one of containment. "We are not looking for quick fixes. We want to hold it to a level where we can just tolerate it until Afghanistan settles down," said Mr. Ghani.
When asked about allegations that Pakistan has used the Taliban to retain its influence in Afghanistan, Mr. Ghani replied: "We could counter that by saying India uses the Northern Alliance."
Well! Ghani, by the way, is apparently not a random blowhard. He’s Pakistan’s man for integrated management of intractable political, diplomatic, and military problems on the borderlands, having come to the NWFP from success in Balochistan, Pakistan’s other wild and angry western province that harbors a serious separatist movement and prickly relations with neighboring Iran.
So it looks like pretty much everybody thinks its necessary to talk with Mullah Omar. It will be interesting to see if the Department of Defense, even under the direction of arch-realist Secretary Gates, is willing to field that hot potato.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Enemy of the Enemy of My Enemy…Oh, Forget It
Via Juan Cole comes the rather jaw-dropping news that Mullah Omar will be dropped from the U.S. State Department terrorist list.
By U.S. standards, they don’t get much more terroristy than Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban and onetime leader of the hard-core Islamic fundamentalist Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, who blew up Buddhas, burka’d the female population, instituted sharia law, and harbored bin Laden until he was deposed by the 2002 U.S.-led invasion.
Recognizing him as a political actor in good standing makes the whole deadly, six-year, multi-billion dollar effort to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan look like some kind of bad joke.
Of course, rehabilitating Mullah Omar is all about the reopening of the negotiation track with the Taliban that has been brewing for the last few months and is being executed by our new CENTCOM chief, David Petraeus.
However, Omar should not start measuring the presidential office in Kabul for new drapes just yet. I don’t think the United States is sincere about bringing him into the big tent unless he brings the head of Osama bin Laden with him—and that’s not likely.
If events in Iraq are any guide, the invite to Mullah Omar is part of the U.S. strategy to get various Taliban groupings to start talking to the United States instead of conspiring between themselves and wedge one of the weaker commanders away from the rest with the promise that the U.S. will give him a better deal than he’ll get as part of a Taliban reconquest. It’s a stretch, but I’m voting for the terminally vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (interesting point that Mullah Omar’s coming off the State Department’s terrorist black list but Hekmatyar’s apparently still on; wonder if the U.S. is trying to get into Hekmatyar’s head with that one) as Afghanistan’s Maliki.
With Hekmatyar ensconced in the presidential palace, the Pashtun insurgency split, and the Tajiks and other ethnic group buddying up to the only Taliban who isn’t going to cut their heads off, at least for the time being, the U.S. military hopes to be presiding over an uneasy peace or, from another perspective, another billion-dollar Mexican stand-off that gives the United States the decisive role of power broker in Afghanistan.
And Mullah Omar comes away from the talks empty-handed as the U.S. tries to grind him down through direct military operations, assassinations, and the assistance of Afghan and Pakistani forces.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the factor that militates against this rosy scenario is the fact that Pakistan isn’t Iran.
Iran is a force for stability in Iraq, reining in the Dawa Party and al-Sadr, since it has the confidence that its propinquity and political and economic reach guarantee that Maliki, a sometime U.S. client, will be a full-time ally of Iran.
Pakistan, on the other hand, weak, divided, teetering on the edge of political and economic collapse, beset with a Pashtun insurgency it is more interested in accommodating than destroying, and precious little power to project will see little profit if Kabul is in control of a renegade Taliban with a pro-U.S. and Iranian tilt.
Pakistan—and, for that matter, Saudi Arabia—have too little stake in a stable Pakistan and little interest in eliminating or marginalizing Mullah Omar. It’s likely that the Pashtun insurgency will keep the pot boiling some time to come despite the negotiation initiatives.
By U.S. standards, they don’t get much more terroristy than Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban and onetime leader of the hard-core Islamic fundamentalist Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, who blew up Buddhas, burka’d the female population, instituted sharia law, and harbored bin Laden until he was deposed by the 2002 U.S.-led invasion.
Recognizing him as a political actor in good standing makes the whole deadly, six-year, multi-billion dollar effort to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan look like some kind of bad joke.
Of course, rehabilitating Mullah Omar is all about the reopening of the negotiation track with the Taliban that has been brewing for the last few months and is being executed by our new CENTCOM chief, David Petraeus.
However, Omar should not start measuring the presidential office in Kabul for new drapes just yet. I don’t think the United States is sincere about bringing him into the big tent unless he brings the head of Osama bin Laden with him—and that’s not likely.
If events in Iraq are any guide, the invite to Mullah Omar is part of the U.S. strategy to get various Taliban groupings to start talking to the United States instead of conspiring between themselves and wedge one of the weaker commanders away from the rest with the promise that the U.S. will give him a better deal than he’ll get as part of a Taliban reconquest. It’s a stretch, but I’m voting for the terminally vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (interesting point that Mullah Omar’s coming off the State Department’s terrorist black list but Hekmatyar’s apparently still on; wonder if the U.S. is trying to get into Hekmatyar’s head with that one) as Afghanistan’s Maliki.
With Hekmatyar ensconced in the presidential palace, the Pashtun insurgency split, and the Tajiks and other ethnic group buddying up to the only Taliban who isn’t going to cut their heads off, at least for the time being, the U.S. military hopes to be presiding over an uneasy peace or, from another perspective, another billion-dollar Mexican stand-off that gives the United States the decisive role of power broker in Afghanistan.
And Mullah Omar comes away from the talks empty-handed as the U.S. tries to grind him down through direct military operations, assassinations, and the assistance of Afghan and Pakistani forces.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the factor that militates against this rosy scenario is the fact that Pakistan isn’t Iran.
Iran is a force for stability in Iraq, reining in the Dawa Party and al-Sadr, since it has the confidence that its propinquity and political and economic reach guarantee that Maliki, a sometime U.S. client, will be a full-time ally of Iran.
Pakistan, on the other hand, weak, divided, teetering on the edge of political and economic collapse, beset with a Pashtun insurgency it is more interested in accommodating than destroying, and precious little power to project will see little profit if Kabul is in control of a renegade Taliban with a pro-U.S. and Iranian tilt.
Pakistan—and, for that matter, Saudi Arabia—have too little stake in a stable Pakistan and little interest in eliminating or marginalizing Mullah Omar. It’s likely that the Pashtun insurgency will keep the pot boiling some time to come despite the negotiation initiatives.
Friday, November 07, 2008
There Will Be Blood
Democracy and Its Death Squads
To civilian liberals of a hawkish bent, General Petraeus projects the reassuring image of the thinking person’s general. It’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that operating death squads might be an integral—and perhaps the vital—component of the vaunted Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency. Or that death squads will probably continue to play a central role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan under an Obama administration.
As his adoring Wikipedia biography relates, General Petraeus is quite the intellectual:
Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—class of 1983. He subsequently earned a M.P.A. degree (1985) and a Ph.D. degree (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy—class of 1974—from which he graduated as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class).
For twenty years, Petraeus climbed the ladder with a series of staff assignments. From 1991 to 1993, a lieutenant colonel, he got his command ticket punched by leading a regiment and later a battalion of the 101st Airborne, before returning to staff work.
In an indication of the indignities that prolonged peace can inflict on military biography, Wikipedia had to make do with this example of courage and tenacity under fire:
As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans [nickname for the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st’s 3rd Battalion; comes from a mangling of the Japanese word for “paratrooper”—ed], he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.
Combat experience finally came in 2003 when, as Major General, Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq and settled in to occupy the Ninawa Governate and its chief city, Mosul, in northwest Iraq.
Petraeus treasured his credentials as the enlightened counterinsurgency expert—and the rational, astute military man culturally at ease with civilians and civilian leadership--and assiduously cultivated the mainstream media. His diligence was rewarded:
An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his asking of embedded Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson to "Tell me how this ends," an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad…[Petraeus] was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David', which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."
Before we bid adieu to General Petraeus’ Wikipedia entry, we should unpack the description of his signature success—the pacification of Mosul during the occupation:
In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.
The traditional preoccupation of the military—killing people and blowing stuff up—is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.
This sort of verbiage is important.
In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.
For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care.
However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike.
And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.
According to Bob Woodward’s most recent book, The War Within, the activities of death squads in Iraq was one of the key factors in the reduction of violence under General Petraeus’s watch as commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq:
Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.
Senior military officers and officials at the White House urged against publishing details or code names associated with the groundbreaking programs, arguing that publication of the names alone might harm the operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq. As a result, specific operational details have been omitted in this report and in "The War Within."
But a number of authoritative sources say the covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from the new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance.
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.
Asked in an interview about the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, President Bush offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."
It would seem to me that “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” had been deployed in Iraq to battle the insurgency from the beginning, and the U.S. military have been eavesdropping, bribing, and strongarming the locals in order to improve its tactical position in raids from Day One.
What probably made special operations so “awesome” in 2007 was the employment, coordination, and organization of these “techniques and information” in the service of a unified, strategic, and pro-active policy of targeted killings to decapitate and disrupt the opposition to the occupation.
In other words, death squads. Calling them “targeted killings” looks like a distinction without much of a difference. And “special operations” is just a euphemism.
And I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.
We’ll have to take his word for it as far as Iraq goes, anyway.
In Afghanistan, things are a little different. We’re not doing too well there, and the Karzai government is often willing to present its own version of U.S. operations.
Yesterday President Karzai went on record deploring an incompetently targeted tactical kinetic operation that apparently killed 40 people--including two dozen children--when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed a wedding party while trying to put paid to some fleeing Taliban militants nearby.
And in Pakistan, things are a lot different. Everybody there hates what we’re doing, the independent media aggressively reports U.S. operations, and the government leaks like a sieve. And in the middle of this we’re trying to mount a successful death squad campaign 1) across borders and 2) remotely, using drones and 3) trying not to kill so many civilians that the Pakistan government moves beyond toothless protests to actual opposition to the incursions.
Perhaps not a recipe for success. But we’re certainly trying. And General Petraeus is on board.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s western tribal areas have been subjected to a flurry of U.S. Predator drone attacks targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. According to the Washington Post, since August there have been 18 attacks, which have killed over 100 people.
The Washington Post article further reported on an interesting development, one that maybe puts some flesh on those “most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government,” in the context of the most recent strike, which killed up to 19 people in North Waziristan:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become notably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesman in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about potential targets.
Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about potential small-scale spying devices being deployed in local villages. Called "patri" by the locals in the dominant language of Pashto, tribesmen have lately made a habit of constantly sweeping the areas around their homes for any signaling devices, he said.
"They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said. "These people have their own enmity between each other so there is a fear that they could just throw one of these chips or devices into their enemy's house."
The take in yesterday’s attack, according to an unnamed Pakistan intelligence officer: four foreign fighters killed out of a total of up to 19 dead (the Washington Post headline led with the more comforting but unsourced statement that only 12 people had died in the attack, giving a more acceptable collateral damage to bad guy ratio of 3:1).
And Pakistan can expect more of the same, according to newly minted CENTCOM chief General Petraeus, who was just in Islamabad (also from the Washington Post article):
U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said during a visit to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad this week that he would heed the Pakistani government's concerns about the U.S.-led, cross-border strikes. But during a subsequent visit to Afghanistan this week, Petraeus touted the success of such attacks in eliminating top Taliban commanders. He has made no express promise to end the missile strikes.
During an interview with AP in Afghanistan reported by Pakistan’s Daily Times, General Petraeus’ irony detector was perhaps off-line when he talked about:
[C]onfronting the extremists who have turned what used to be fairly peaceful areas into strongholds for individuals who . . . believe that they have the right to blow up other people who do not see the world the way they do.”
Death squads are inseparable from counter-insurgency. If we’re going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan (and take the battle to Pakistan) we should get used to them. And we shouldn’t let General Petraeus—or his willingness to pander to our desire to distract ourselves with hearts and minds fables of counterinsurgency --shield us from the truth.
To civilian liberals of a hawkish bent, General Petraeus projects the reassuring image of the thinking person’s general. It’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that operating death squads might be an integral—and perhaps the vital—component of the vaunted Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency. Or that death squads will probably continue to play a central role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan under an Obama administration.
As his adoring Wikipedia biography relates, General Petraeus is quite the intellectual:
Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—class of 1983. He subsequently earned a M.P.A. degree (1985) and a Ph.D. degree (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy—class of 1974—from which he graduated as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class).
For twenty years, Petraeus climbed the ladder with a series of staff assignments. From 1991 to 1993, a lieutenant colonel, he got his command ticket punched by leading a regiment and later a battalion of the 101st Airborne, before returning to staff work.
In an indication of the indignities that prolonged peace can inflict on military biography, Wikipedia had to make do with this example of courage and tenacity under fire:
As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans [nickname for the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st’s 3rd Battalion; comes from a mangling of the Japanese word for “paratrooper”—ed], he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.
Combat experience finally came in 2003 when, as Major General, Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq and settled in to occupy the Ninawa Governate and its chief city, Mosul, in northwest Iraq.
Petraeus treasured his credentials as the enlightened counterinsurgency expert—and the rational, astute military man culturally at ease with civilians and civilian leadership--and assiduously cultivated the mainstream media. His diligence was rewarded:
An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his asking of embedded Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson to "Tell me how this ends," an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad…[Petraeus] was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David', which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."
Before we bid adieu to General Petraeus’ Wikipedia entry, we should unpack the description of his signature success—the pacification of Mosul during the occupation:
In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.
The traditional preoccupation of the military—killing people and blowing stuff up—is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.
This sort of verbiage is important.
In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.
For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care.
However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike.
And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.
According to Bob Woodward’s most recent book, The War Within, the activities of death squads in Iraq was one of the key factors in the reduction of violence under General Petraeus’s watch as commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq:
Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.
Senior military officers and officials at the White House urged against publishing details or code names associated with the groundbreaking programs, arguing that publication of the names alone might harm the operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq. As a result, specific operational details have been omitted in this report and in "The War Within."
But a number of authoritative sources say the covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from the new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance.
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.
Asked in an interview about the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, President Bush offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."
It would seem to me that “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” had been deployed in Iraq to battle the insurgency from the beginning, and the U.S. military have been eavesdropping, bribing, and strongarming the locals in order to improve its tactical position in raids from Day One.
What probably made special operations so “awesome” in 2007 was the employment, coordination, and organization of these “techniques and information” in the service of a unified, strategic, and pro-active policy of targeted killings to decapitate and disrupt the opposition to the occupation.
In other words, death squads. Calling them “targeted killings” looks like a distinction without much of a difference. And “special operations” is just a euphemism.
And I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.
We’ll have to take his word for it as far as Iraq goes, anyway.
In Afghanistan, things are a little different. We’re not doing too well there, and the Karzai government is often willing to present its own version of U.S. operations.
Yesterday President Karzai went on record deploring an incompetently targeted tactical kinetic operation that apparently killed 40 people--including two dozen children--when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed a wedding party while trying to put paid to some fleeing Taliban militants nearby.
And in Pakistan, things are a lot different. Everybody there hates what we’re doing, the independent media aggressively reports U.S. operations, and the government leaks like a sieve. And in the middle of this we’re trying to mount a successful death squad campaign 1) across borders and 2) remotely, using drones and 3) trying not to kill so many civilians that the Pakistan government moves beyond toothless protests to actual opposition to the incursions.
Perhaps not a recipe for success. But we’re certainly trying. And General Petraeus is on board.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s western tribal areas have been subjected to a flurry of U.S. Predator drone attacks targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. According to the Washington Post, since August there have been 18 attacks, which have killed over 100 people.
The Washington Post article further reported on an interesting development, one that maybe puts some flesh on those “most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government,” in the context of the most recent strike, which killed up to 19 people in North Waziristan:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become notably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesman in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about potential targets.
Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about potential small-scale spying devices being deployed in local villages. Called "patri" by the locals in the dominant language of Pashto, tribesmen have lately made a habit of constantly sweeping the areas around their homes for any signaling devices, he said.
"They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said. "These people have their own enmity between each other so there is a fear that they could just throw one of these chips or devices into their enemy's house."
The take in yesterday’s attack, according to an unnamed Pakistan intelligence officer: four foreign fighters killed out of a total of up to 19 dead (the Washington Post headline led with the more comforting but unsourced statement that only 12 people had died in the attack, giving a more acceptable collateral damage to bad guy ratio of 3:1).
And Pakistan can expect more of the same, according to newly minted CENTCOM chief General Petraeus, who was just in Islamabad (also from the Washington Post article):
U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said during a visit to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad this week that he would heed the Pakistani government's concerns about the U.S.-led, cross-border strikes. But during a subsequent visit to Afghanistan this week, Petraeus touted the success of such attacks in eliminating top Taliban commanders. He has made no express promise to end the missile strikes.
During an interview with AP in Afghanistan reported by Pakistan’s Daily Times, General Petraeus’ irony detector was perhaps off-line when he talked about:
[C]onfronting the extremists who have turned what used to be fairly peaceful areas into strongholds for individuals who . . . believe that they have the right to blow up other people who do not see the world the way they do.”
Death squads are inseparable from counter-insurgency. If we’re going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan (and take the battle to Pakistan) we should get used to them. And we shouldn’t let General Petraeus—or his willingness to pander to our desire to distract ourselves with hearts and minds fables of counterinsurgency --shield us from the truth.
Monday, November 03, 2008
America's Raw Deal for Pakistan
One might wonder why the world community seems intent on torturing Pakistan’s civilian government over the terms of a bailout to cover its current account deficit.
Musharraf got blank checks.
Asif Zardari gets a brusque push into the unwelcome embrace of the International Monetary Fund.
The answer seems to be that the PPP-led government’s bargaining position is so weak there’s only one kind of deal it can make—a raw deal.
A little background.
For years, Pakistan, exporting food products and textiles and importing petroleum products and equipment for its industry and military, has run a chronic current account deficit of about S$4 billion per annum.
A combination of worker’s remittances, foreign investment, foreign aid, and foreign loans has made up the shortfall.
Last year, before the subprime meltdown was even a gleam in Wall Street’s eye, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Pakistan’s sovereign foreign currency debt to CCC+ with a negative long-term outlook because of the unrest and uncertainty surrounding Musharraf’s divisive and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to short-circuit civilian rule and give himself a third term as president.
S&P considered Pakistan especially vulnerable because “the political turmoil exposes the sovereign to external pressures if foreign direct investments and other equity inflows, which have funded about two-thirds of the country’s large current account deficit (estimated at just under 20% of current account receipts in fiscal 2006-2007), diminish significantly.”
Things did not get better in 2008.
Asif Zardari’s PPP government squandered the goodwill of the parliamentary elections that returned Pakistan to civilian rule by leaning on the United States for political backing, playing footsie with Musharraf, and alienating the lawyers and PML-N party leaders who were the PPP’s electoral allies. As a result, virtually all of Pakistan’s political players are happy to watch a not-particularly-capable Zardari flounder ineffectually as the country’s political and economic rot intensifies.
Participation in the aggressive US strategy against Taliban on both sides of the Afghan border exposed Pakistan to a harrowing series of terrorist attacks and discouraged foreign investment.
Then the oil and food bubbles ruinously increased the cost of Pakistan’s imports and added high inflation to the economic mix.
Finally, the world financial crisis guaranteed that there would be no excess supply of foolishly optimistic capital for the Karachi Stock Exchange, which slumped 35%.
So Pakistan has a simple but pressing problem.
With imports chugging along and its sources of capital inflows dwindling, the central bank has only enough cash on hand to finance imports for about six weeks.
Pakistan has declared it needs about $4-$6 billion to make it through the next two years while it gets its house in better order and waits for an improvement in the world economy that should boost exports and increase capital inflows.
US$6 billion is not an awful lot of money.
It’s about the cost of two weeks’ operations in Iraq.
It’s about 1/3 of 1% of China’s forex reserves.
It’s about 4% of Saudi Arabia’s annual net oil export revenues.
But nobody has stepped up to the plate.
Saudi Arabia has so far declined to provide a deferral of payments on oil sales—a facility it had extended to Pakistan in the past.
Zardari went hat in hand to China, Pakistan’s close ally and “all weather friend” who had deposited $500 million into Pakistan’s central bank last year at President Musharraf’s request to help with a similar problem.
But all he came back with was a rather opportunistic proposal that the Chinese would send a team to research the purchase of a 26% share in the National Bank of Pakistan, Pakistan’s biggest commercial bank. Back of the envelope guesstimating indicates that the Chinese are talking about putting in less than $300 million for a stake that would have been valued at about $1 billion back in 2005. Ouch!
As for the West, the U.S. and Great Britain corralled the world community into an ad hoc “Friends of Pakistan” talking shop, with the pressing objective of…well, not doing very much, apparently, except to keep Pakistan twisting in the wind.
At a press conference in Islamabad on October 20, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, squelched any idea that Pakistan would be seeing a quick and easy answer to its forex problems (emphasis added):
The Friends of Pakistan group -- how can I say it? It’s a group that’s a strategic group. It’s a way of combining the Pakistani Government efforts and the Western -- not Western -- and the Friends efforts: government like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, China, the United Kingdom. And you saw, you know, in New York there were at least a dozen countries there and we’re always hearing from more who would like to be part of this.
So the goal is not…I mean, it’s not to throw money on the table. The goal is to put money where it belongs to support really concrete and positive goals. So it’s going to be a systematic process. It’s going to be a strategic process that looks at problems, looks at what the Pakistani Government is doing, looks at their approach and what effort that they’re making, and then looks at how we need to support and supplement those efforts, so that we really cover some of these problems comprehensively and we don’t leave things undone or leave holes.
You know, is that going to produce more money? Yes, it probably will in the long run. But it’s not a…it’s not a cash advance. There are other steps being taken, you might say, somewhat parallel on the fiscal and monetary problems. Those things are coordinated with treasuries, finance ministries, international institutions. And…but Friends is more devoted to making sure that on the strategic level that we understand Pakistan’s plans and that we’re putting our programs to support them.
With “Friends” like this, one might say…
The unmistakable intention of the United States and its allies is to force the Pakistan government to endure the shame of “Plan C”—the humiliating and politically dangerous recourse of turning to the International Monetary Fund.
Today, the IMF, according to accounts leaked to the Pakistan media (H/T to Reuters' Pakistan blog) is insisting on some astounding conditions:
Pakistan’s The News, citing an internal document, sets out what it said were extremely tough conditions.
1) a 30 percent cut in the defence budget between 2009 and 2020
2) reduce government pensionable jobs from 350,000 to 120,000
3) a new taxation structure to raise revenues including tax on wheat production and other crops
4) Revenue collection reports/analyses to be submitted each quarter to the IMF down to the provincial level
5) Six IMF directors and two from the World Bank to monitor preparation of the federal budget
One might wonder why, with Pakistan tottering on the brink of collapse, the IMF is adding onerous terms that will a) antagonize the military by slashing its budget and b) infuriate its hardpressed citizens—especially in the PPP’s political base, the agri-intensive province of Sindh--by increasing taxes while the economy is flat on its back and c) increase political unrest and make the PPP government even more unpopular by throwing tens of thousands of bureaucrats out of work.
Actually, it is quite possible that the IMF never made these extreme demands, and the Zardari government—which has never been shy or particularly subtle in shading the truth—prepared this monstrous list to demonstrate its fearsome negotiating prowess to the Pakistani public and lessen the shock when it reveals the actual, lesser concessions that the IMF has demanded in return for granting the loan.
Nevertheless, it’s puzzling that the United States is pushing the IMF on Pakistan at this particular juncture.
Pakistan’s economy, though not an exemplar of transparency or efficiency, is in this case the victim of many unfavorable external events and a worldwide financial crisis precipitated by the same kind of overpaid, overreaching financial bureaucrats that oversee the IMF.
So it seems rather unfair that the IMF is taking advantage of Pakistan’s difficulties to impose some of that notorious IMF meddling medicine that has made it despised throughout the developing world.
And, considering that the U.S.-led adventure in Afghanistan is tottering despite uncounted and unaccountable billions of dollars of expenditures and thousands of lives, and Pakistan is standing on the abyss of anarchy, now is an odd time for the U.S. to insist that the IMF be allowed to peddle its deeply unpopular and destabilizing free-market nostrums to Zardari’s government in return for a bridge loan.
Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis see the IMF working as a tool of the U.S. government and Western security priorities for Pakistan.
Quoting unnamed analysts, Syed Fazl-e-Haider wrote in Asia Times:
The United States is using the Washington-based and largely US-financed IMF as a tool to impose its own terms and conditions related to the "war on terror", in which Pakistan has been declared by the US as a major theater of war, the analysts said.
Much to its chagrin, Pakistan has been negotiating with the IMF in Dubai and, according to an October 31 report in Pakistan’s The Nation has apparently reached agreement on a $9 billion loan.
The first disbursement of money from the IMF, which is likely to be for $3 billion to $4 billion, will only come after Pakistan has filed a formal request and the IMF has approved the aid. Shaukat Tarin, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance, told Daily Telegraph that the money was needed urgently as confidence levels in Pakistan’s nosediving economy was ‘fast deteriorating’.
Tarin said that first payment was needed in 20 days. He added that the IMF should finalise the agreement by November 15 ahead of a fund raising conference to be held two days later by the Friends of Pakistan, a forum which includes the US, UK, China and Saudi Arabia, in Abu Dhabi.
He said that Pakistan’s allies were “looking for an endorsement from the IMF” of the country’s economic plan before they committed to offering more money.
Pakistan is loathe to confirm that it has struck a deal with the IMF and is still holding out hope that a face-saving offer of assistance from Saudi Arabia and/or China will emerge.
Zardari is making a swing to Saudi Arabia for oil aid, the AP reported:
Economist Muzammil Aslam predicted Zardari would ask for $3 billion in deferred oil payments from the Saudis, but warned that Pakistan should prepare for IMF assistance.
"If you miss the IMF now, you will need it again some months later, and that time you will have to accept more tough conditions," he said.
Pakistan hopes that its front-line role in the war on terrorism will nudge its allies to prevent its economic downfall. But Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and other nations may condition any aid they give on Pakistan submitting to an IMF package, which would come with strict spending rules, said Shahid Hasan Siddiqui, a top economist.
Pakistan Finance Ministry chief Shaukat Tareen has said that if he does not get indications of a forthcoming bailout from allies by Nov. 10 "there is no other option but to go to the IMF."
A meeting of the “Friends of Pakistan” is scheduled for November 17 in Abu Dhabi. That’s a little late for a rescue mission for a government that’s running on fumes, financially--though the timing is just right to force Pakistan to deal with the IMF. In fact, it’s assumed that the Zardari government will have already knuckled under to the IMF come November 17.
"I assume that by the date of the (Friends of Pakistan) conference the negotiations with the IMF will have been concluded," [German Foreign Minister] Steinmeier said. "This assumes that there is agreement on the conditions. We are both confident that this will happen in the next few days."
Even if Saudi Arabia and China show up at the “Friends of Pakistan” conference with public announcements of funding, the damage, as far as the PPP is concerned, is already done.
Being forced to resort to the IMF is a conspicuous failure for the Zardari government. Three years ago, when Pakistan got out from under the IMF’s thumb, Pervez Musharraf triumphantly announced, “We have broken the begging bowl.” Now Zardari, the man who drove him from office, has to highlight his growing political isolation inside and outside the country and his reliance on the United States by playing the role of mendicant to the West.
With understandable frustration, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Gilani is wondering why Pakistan’s deep-pocketed foreign friends are unwilling to come up with the money to help his country, ostensibly the keystone of the world struggle against Islamic extremism.
It’s a rather telling fact that India is more enthusiastic about the IMF bailout (see the Times of India report India may help Pakistan get bailout) than Pakistan, especially since the United States would make sure that any defense cuts (which Pakistan’s defense minister has already defiantly declared to be off the table) would come at the expense of Pakistani forces on the Pakistan-India border, while maintaining or increasing military efforts against America’s bete noire, the Pakistani Taliban, on the Afghan border.
Mr. Gilani, I would characterize your situation as a perfect storm of unfavorable events.
First, it’s quite likely that the U.S. government is trying to control the provision of financial aid to Pakistan in order to exert pressure on your government to support and implement pro-U.S. policies more enthusiastically. And don’t be surprised if the United States is close to giving up on Pakistan’s civilian government and wouldn’t mind fomenting a national crisis that forces Army Chief of Staff Kiyani or some other military savior to step up and take over for the good of the nation.
At the very least, by ostentatiously distancing itself from financial aid to Pakistan through the dual cut-outs of the “Friends of Pakistan” and the IMF, the United States is publicly declaring that, post-Musharraf, the special relationship with the civilian government is not really all that special—especially if Nawaz Sharif takes over-- and is taking this opportunity to yank the leash of a wayward and not particularly capable client.
Second, the reason that neither China nor Saudi Arabia have stepped up to help out is because they feel that the Zardari government’s policy of acting as a U.S. client and signing on to the whole counter-insurgency package in Pashtun areas of Pakistan is catastrophically wrong-headed and contrary to their best interests and they wouldn’t mind your government falling either, to be replaced either by a new government headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, or some general.
I suspect that the Saudis and the Chinese will hold the winning hand here.
Zardari’s government is tottering because his pro-U.S./aggressive anti-Taliban policies are extremely unpopular within Pakistan. Propping him up with an IMF loan is going to accelerate the political rot.
If the PPP government falls—especially if it collapses because of U.S. manipulation of its current account deficit crisis—any new civilian government will be headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, a prospect that gives Washington the collywobbles because of Sharif’s extremely popular pro-Saudi/Taliban-accommodating stance.
But even if a general can be found to rescue Pakistan from the catastrophe of Nawaz Sharif and a civilian government attuned to the popular will, America’s problems will be far from over.
The Pakistani populace is now politically energized, and any new military regime will have to take into account its vocal desire for a security policy decoupled from U.S. strategy and emphasizing negotiation and reconciliation with the Pakistani Taliban.
Furthermore, the United States has terminally fouled up its relations with Pakistan’s armed forces by its overt tilt toward India as its preferred South Asian partner and counterweight to emerging superpower (and Pakistan best buddy) China—both by concluding a concessionary bilateral nuclear agreement with New Delhi and shepherding it through the international non-proliferation process, and by providing cover for India to establish a strategic alliance with the Karzai government in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s traditional back yard.
Pakistan’s PPP government is caught in the middle. It can’t deliver unstinting support to the United States in its struggle in Afghanistan, and it can’t deliver a non-aligned policy that reduces U.S. influence and boosts Saudi and Chinese presence in the region.
That’s why nobody is willing to offer Pakistan anything—except a raw deal.
Musharraf got blank checks.
Asif Zardari gets a brusque push into the unwelcome embrace of the International Monetary Fund.
The answer seems to be that the PPP-led government’s bargaining position is so weak there’s only one kind of deal it can make—a raw deal.
A little background.
For years, Pakistan, exporting food products and textiles and importing petroleum products and equipment for its industry and military, has run a chronic current account deficit of about S$4 billion per annum.
A combination of worker’s remittances, foreign investment, foreign aid, and foreign loans has made up the shortfall.
Last year, before the subprime meltdown was even a gleam in Wall Street’s eye, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Pakistan’s sovereign foreign currency debt to CCC+ with a negative long-term outlook because of the unrest and uncertainty surrounding Musharraf’s divisive and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to short-circuit civilian rule and give himself a third term as president.
S&P considered Pakistan especially vulnerable because “the political turmoil exposes the sovereign to external pressures if foreign direct investments and other equity inflows, which have funded about two-thirds of the country’s large current account deficit (estimated at just under 20% of current account receipts in fiscal 2006-2007), diminish significantly.”
Things did not get better in 2008.
Asif Zardari’s PPP government squandered the goodwill of the parliamentary elections that returned Pakistan to civilian rule by leaning on the United States for political backing, playing footsie with Musharraf, and alienating the lawyers and PML-N party leaders who were the PPP’s electoral allies. As a result, virtually all of Pakistan’s political players are happy to watch a not-particularly-capable Zardari flounder ineffectually as the country’s political and economic rot intensifies.
Participation in the aggressive US strategy against Taliban on both sides of the Afghan border exposed Pakistan to a harrowing series of terrorist attacks and discouraged foreign investment.
Then the oil and food bubbles ruinously increased the cost of Pakistan’s imports and added high inflation to the economic mix.
Finally, the world financial crisis guaranteed that there would be no excess supply of foolishly optimistic capital for the Karachi Stock Exchange, which slumped 35%.
So Pakistan has a simple but pressing problem.
With imports chugging along and its sources of capital inflows dwindling, the central bank has only enough cash on hand to finance imports for about six weeks.
Pakistan has declared it needs about $4-$6 billion to make it through the next two years while it gets its house in better order and waits for an improvement in the world economy that should boost exports and increase capital inflows.
US$6 billion is not an awful lot of money.
It’s about the cost of two weeks’ operations in Iraq.
It’s about 1/3 of 1% of China’s forex reserves.
It’s about 4% of Saudi Arabia’s annual net oil export revenues.
But nobody has stepped up to the plate.
Saudi Arabia has so far declined to provide a deferral of payments on oil sales—a facility it had extended to Pakistan in the past.
Zardari went hat in hand to China, Pakistan’s close ally and “all weather friend” who had deposited $500 million into Pakistan’s central bank last year at President Musharraf’s request to help with a similar problem.
But all he came back with was a rather opportunistic proposal that the Chinese would send a team to research the purchase of a 26% share in the National Bank of Pakistan, Pakistan’s biggest commercial bank. Back of the envelope guesstimating indicates that the Chinese are talking about putting in less than $300 million for a stake that would have been valued at about $1 billion back in 2005. Ouch!
As for the West, the U.S. and Great Britain corralled the world community into an ad hoc “Friends of Pakistan” talking shop, with the pressing objective of…well, not doing very much, apparently, except to keep Pakistan twisting in the wind.
At a press conference in Islamabad on October 20, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, squelched any idea that Pakistan would be seeing a quick and easy answer to its forex problems (emphasis added):
The Friends of Pakistan group -- how can I say it? It’s a group that’s a strategic group. It’s a way of combining the Pakistani Government efforts and the Western -- not Western -- and the Friends efforts: government like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, China, the United Kingdom. And you saw, you know, in New York there were at least a dozen countries there and we’re always hearing from more who would like to be part of this.
So the goal is not…I mean, it’s not to throw money on the table. The goal is to put money where it belongs to support really concrete and positive goals. So it’s going to be a systematic process. It’s going to be a strategic process that looks at problems, looks at what the Pakistani Government is doing, looks at their approach and what effort that they’re making, and then looks at how we need to support and supplement those efforts, so that we really cover some of these problems comprehensively and we don’t leave things undone or leave holes.
You know, is that going to produce more money? Yes, it probably will in the long run. But it’s not a…it’s not a cash advance. There are other steps being taken, you might say, somewhat parallel on the fiscal and monetary problems. Those things are coordinated with treasuries, finance ministries, international institutions. And…but Friends is more devoted to making sure that on the strategic level that we understand Pakistan’s plans and that we’re putting our programs to support them.
With “Friends” like this, one might say…
The unmistakable intention of the United States and its allies is to force the Pakistan government to endure the shame of “Plan C”—the humiliating and politically dangerous recourse of turning to the International Monetary Fund.
Today, the IMF, according to accounts leaked to the Pakistan media (H/T to Reuters' Pakistan blog) is insisting on some astounding conditions:
Pakistan’s The News, citing an internal document, sets out what it said were extremely tough conditions.
1) a 30 percent cut in the defence budget between 2009 and 2020
2) reduce government pensionable jobs from 350,000 to 120,000
3) a new taxation structure to raise revenues including tax on wheat production and other crops
4) Revenue collection reports/analyses to be submitted each quarter to the IMF down to the provincial level
5) Six IMF directors and two from the World Bank to monitor preparation of the federal budget
One might wonder why, with Pakistan tottering on the brink of collapse, the IMF is adding onerous terms that will a) antagonize the military by slashing its budget and b) infuriate its hardpressed citizens—especially in the PPP’s political base, the agri-intensive province of Sindh--by increasing taxes while the economy is flat on its back and c) increase political unrest and make the PPP government even more unpopular by throwing tens of thousands of bureaucrats out of work.
Actually, it is quite possible that the IMF never made these extreme demands, and the Zardari government—which has never been shy or particularly subtle in shading the truth—prepared this monstrous list to demonstrate its fearsome negotiating prowess to the Pakistani public and lessen the shock when it reveals the actual, lesser concessions that the IMF has demanded in return for granting the loan.
Nevertheless, it’s puzzling that the United States is pushing the IMF on Pakistan at this particular juncture.
Pakistan’s economy, though not an exemplar of transparency or efficiency, is in this case the victim of many unfavorable external events and a worldwide financial crisis precipitated by the same kind of overpaid, overreaching financial bureaucrats that oversee the IMF.
So it seems rather unfair that the IMF is taking advantage of Pakistan’s difficulties to impose some of that notorious IMF meddling medicine that has made it despised throughout the developing world.
And, considering that the U.S.-led adventure in Afghanistan is tottering despite uncounted and unaccountable billions of dollars of expenditures and thousands of lives, and Pakistan is standing on the abyss of anarchy, now is an odd time for the U.S. to insist that the IMF be allowed to peddle its deeply unpopular and destabilizing free-market nostrums to Zardari’s government in return for a bridge loan.
Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis see the IMF working as a tool of the U.S. government and Western security priorities for Pakistan.
Quoting unnamed analysts, Syed Fazl-e-Haider wrote in Asia Times:
The United States is using the Washington-based and largely US-financed IMF as a tool to impose its own terms and conditions related to the "war on terror", in which Pakistan has been declared by the US as a major theater of war, the analysts said.
Much to its chagrin, Pakistan has been negotiating with the IMF in Dubai and, according to an October 31 report in Pakistan’s The Nation has apparently reached agreement on a $9 billion loan.
The first disbursement of money from the IMF, which is likely to be for $3 billion to $4 billion, will only come after Pakistan has filed a formal request and the IMF has approved the aid. Shaukat Tarin, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance, told Daily Telegraph that the money was needed urgently as confidence levels in Pakistan’s nosediving economy was ‘fast deteriorating’.
Tarin said that first payment was needed in 20 days. He added that the IMF should finalise the agreement by November 15 ahead of a fund raising conference to be held two days later by the Friends of Pakistan, a forum which includes the US, UK, China and Saudi Arabia, in Abu Dhabi.
He said that Pakistan’s allies were “looking for an endorsement from the IMF” of the country’s economic plan before they committed to offering more money.
Pakistan is loathe to confirm that it has struck a deal with the IMF and is still holding out hope that a face-saving offer of assistance from Saudi Arabia and/or China will emerge.
Zardari is making a swing to Saudi Arabia for oil aid, the AP reported:
Economist Muzammil Aslam predicted Zardari would ask for $3 billion in deferred oil payments from the Saudis, but warned that Pakistan should prepare for IMF assistance.
"If you miss the IMF now, you will need it again some months later, and that time you will have to accept more tough conditions," he said.
Pakistan hopes that its front-line role in the war on terrorism will nudge its allies to prevent its economic downfall. But Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and other nations may condition any aid they give on Pakistan submitting to an IMF package, which would come with strict spending rules, said Shahid Hasan Siddiqui, a top economist.
Pakistan Finance Ministry chief Shaukat Tareen has said that if he does not get indications of a forthcoming bailout from allies by Nov. 10 "there is no other option but to go to the IMF."
A meeting of the “Friends of Pakistan” is scheduled for November 17 in Abu Dhabi. That’s a little late for a rescue mission for a government that’s running on fumes, financially--though the timing is just right to force Pakistan to deal with the IMF. In fact, it’s assumed that the Zardari government will have already knuckled under to the IMF come November 17.
"I assume that by the date of the (Friends of Pakistan) conference the negotiations with the IMF will have been concluded," [German Foreign Minister] Steinmeier said. "This assumes that there is agreement on the conditions. We are both confident that this will happen in the next few days."
Even if Saudi Arabia and China show up at the “Friends of Pakistan” conference with public announcements of funding, the damage, as far as the PPP is concerned, is already done.
Being forced to resort to the IMF is a conspicuous failure for the Zardari government. Three years ago, when Pakistan got out from under the IMF’s thumb, Pervez Musharraf triumphantly announced, “We have broken the begging bowl.” Now Zardari, the man who drove him from office, has to highlight his growing political isolation inside and outside the country and his reliance on the United States by playing the role of mendicant to the West.
With understandable frustration, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Gilani is wondering why Pakistan’s deep-pocketed foreign friends are unwilling to come up with the money to help his country, ostensibly the keystone of the world struggle against Islamic extremism.
It’s a rather telling fact that India is more enthusiastic about the IMF bailout (see the Times of India report India may help Pakistan get bailout) than Pakistan, especially since the United States would make sure that any defense cuts (which Pakistan’s defense minister has already defiantly declared to be off the table) would come at the expense of Pakistani forces on the Pakistan-India border, while maintaining or increasing military efforts against America’s bete noire, the Pakistani Taliban, on the Afghan border.
Mr. Gilani, I would characterize your situation as a perfect storm of unfavorable events.
First, it’s quite likely that the U.S. government is trying to control the provision of financial aid to Pakistan in order to exert pressure on your government to support and implement pro-U.S. policies more enthusiastically. And don’t be surprised if the United States is close to giving up on Pakistan’s civilian government and wouldn’t mind fomenting a national crisis that forces Army Chief of Staff Kiyani or some other military savior to step up and take over for the good of the nation.
At the very least, by ostentatiously distancing itself from financial aid to Pakistan through the dual cut-outs of the “Friends of Pakistan” and the IMF, the United States is publicly declaring that, post-Musharraf, the special relationship with the civilian government is not really all that special—especially if Nawaz Sharif takes over-- and is taking this opportunity to yank the leash of a wayward and not particularly capable client.
Second, the reason that neither China nor Saudi Arabia have stepped up to help out is because they feel that the Zardari government’s policy of acting as a U.S. client and signing on to the whole counter-insurgency package in Pashtun areas of Pakistan is catastrophically wrong-headed and contrary to their best interests and they wouldn’t mind your government falling either, to be replaced either by a new government headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, or some general.
I suspect that the Saudis and the Chinese will hold the winning hand here.
Zardari’s government is tottering because his pro-U.S./aggressive anti-Taliban policies are extremely unpopular within Pakistan. Propping him up with an IMF loan is going to accelerate the political rot.
If the PPP government falls—especially if it collapses because of U.S. manipulation of its current account deficit crisis—any new civilian government will be headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, a prospect that gives Washington the collywobbles because of Sharif’s extremely popular pro-Saudi/Taliban-accommodating stance.
But even if a general can be found to rescue Pakistan from the catastrophe of Nawaz Sharif and a civilian government attuned to the popular will, America’s problems will be far from over.
The Pakistani populace is now politically energized, and any new military regime will have to take into account its vocal desire for a security policy decoupled from U.S. strategy and emphasizing negotiation and reconciliation with the Pakistani Taliban.
Furthermore, the United States has terminally fouled up its relations with Pakistan’s armed forces by its overt tilt toward India as its preferred South Asian partner and counterweight to emerging superpower (and Pakistan best buddy) China—both by concluding a concessionary bilateral nuclear agreement with New Delhi and shepherding it through the international non-proliferation process, and by providing cover for India to establish a strategic alliance with the Karzai government in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s traditional back yard.
Pakistan’s PPP government is caught in the middle. It can’t deliver unstinting support to the United States in its struggle in Afghanistan, and it can’t deliver a non-aligned policy that reduces U.S. influence and boosts Saudi and Chinese presence in the region.
That’s why nobody is willing to offer Pakistan anything—except a raw deal.
Monday, October 27, 2008
The Full Monty--Full Circle
When the steelworker-stripper movie The Full Monty came out in 1997, there was a lot of bemused headscratching about the origin of the title phrase.
As we know now, "the full monty" means "in its entirety" or, as applied to stripping, "going all the way".
But where did it come from?
The most commonly accepted explanation in the UK, where the phrase originated, is that that "the full monty" originally applied to a complete suit of clothes (including waistcoat) from Sir Montague (Monty) Burton, who took bespoke tailoring from class to mass with a nationwide chain of shops he opened in England in the early 20th century.
This explanation isn't considered definitive, and there have also been attempts to link the phrase to England's most famous Monty, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, hero of El Alamein, goat of Market Garden, and, to the other Allied military commanders he compulsively belittled and second-guessed, all-around ass and egotist.
"The full Monty" was taken either as a reference to the Field Marshal's affectation in wearing all his medals or reflecting his insistence that his troops eat a full English breakfast.
I came across another possible origin for the phrase in Max Hasting's account of the endgame of the Second World War in Europe, Armageddon.
In his character sketch of Montgomery (pg. 27 of the 2004 Alfred A. Knopf hardback), Hastings cites the following incident:
A member of Montgomery's staff told a bizarre story from the north-west Europe campaign. One of the field-marshal's young liaison officers returned to duty after recovering from wounds, and found himself summoned to Montgomery's caravan. he was ordered to remove his clothes. The bemused young man stood naked at attention before his commander, who observed that he wished to ensure that he was fully fit for duty again. "Right!" said Montgomery after a few moments, in his usual clipped bark. "You can dress and go now!". According to one of his staff, that episode caused considerable surprise even at a headquarters well accustomed to "Master's" foibles.
In the footnotes, Hastings writes that he had collected this anecdote directly from the staff member referred to in the passage, one T.E.B. Howarth. Howarth confided that he had omitted the story from his own published reminiscences of his years with Montgomery "because I don't think the world's quite ready for it yet." Hastings adds complaisantly: "I am happy to remedy the omission".
Indeed, for many years Montgomery's repressed homosexuality was the kink that dared not speak its name in British military history.
Montgomery himself inveighed against the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1976, decrying what he called "a charter for buggery" and famously declaring, "This sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we're British - thank God."
As Richard Davenport-Hines noted in The Independent, any explorations of the sexual character of Montgomery's overpowering affection and devotion to the young men under his command were taboo in the postwar period:
When Lord Chalfont's biography of Montgomery was published after the Field Marshal's death in 1976, it contained a single sentence, in a book of 150,000 words, noting "suggestions of a homosexual element" in Montgomery's relations with one of his liaison officers. Uproar ensued. Field Marshal Templar, the "Tiger of Malaya", accosted Chalfont with the words: "you're the chap who says Monty was a bugger!" The Sunday Express denounced him as "not fit to lead a pack of pimps down Piccadilly".
Things have changed.
Montgomery's official biographer, Nigel Hamilton, was one of the objects of Montgomery's intense but platonic affection--he was 11 when he met the Field Marshal. Hamilton told Sarah Hall of the Guardian:
"I myself have more than 100 very loving letters from him. My relationship with him wasn't sexual, in the sense that it wasn't acted upon, but I had been through enough years at British boarding schools to know what kind of enormous affection and feeling he had for me...And I wasn't alone, this was a consistent pattern in Monty's life."
Hamilton revisited and reshaped his three-volume biography of Montgomery--which, in its first incarnation, focused on rehabilitating the Field Marshal's tattered military reputation-- to address the issue of Montgomery's sexuality and personality as elements of his command effectiveness. Hamilton's rework, inevitably entitled The Full Monty, has attracted some derisive reviews, apparently for its attempts to relate Montgomery's greatest triumph--the victory at El Alamein--to an electric current of neo-spartan mutual man-love coursing through Monty and his troops.
It is possible that an incident of the sort related by Howarth acquired a life of its own in retelling after the war with Montgomery characterized as the overly-punctilious officer taking his responsibilities to extremes.
It would certainly be ironic if, by 1997, the phrase had come full circle to be identified once again with men stripping to the buff for an appreciative audience.
Image of Montgomery from Wikipedia
Friday, October 24, 2008
Betancourt Update--Beer and Helicopters
In an amusing punctuation point to the Ingrid Betancourt rescue in July of this year, on October 19 a television station in Colombia aired shaky footage of the event purportedly shot by a FARC grunt with a digital camera. It concludes with the helicopter containing the precious hostages whizzing off into the clouds while the oblivious gunmen on the ground celebrate a case of beer the rescuers thoughtfully left behind.
D’oh!
The generally calm and matter of fact deportment of the large team of rescuers supports the picture of an operation planned well in advance, and not a last-minute hijacking by the Uribe government of a Europe-negotiated release.
It is also clear that many of the rescuers were impersonating representatives of the International Red Cross—an embarrassing violation of international law that the Colombian government had attempted to obscure in its earlier video release—and that some of the rescuers were pretending to be members of Colombian TV station Telesur—eliciting umbrage from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The operation also aped equipment and arrangements used in two previous hostage releases midwifed by Venezuela.
It is also undeniable that the Colombian government piggybacked its rescue on extensive and recent negotiations with FARC by European representatives, who were in the jungle meeting with FARC representatives a scant five days before the rescue.
According to an AFP report, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged that he was responsible for stories in the Colombian press noting the presence in Colombia of retired French diplomat Noel Saez and Swiss hostage negotiator Jean Pierre Gontard, in order to lull FARC into a false sense of security.
Sources close to French President Sarkozy claim he instructed Saez on the request of Santos to remain in Bogota on the eve of the rescue and delay his return to the jungle.
The Colombian government is extremely keen to present the rescue as a free-standing operation that took months of planning and infiltration of high levels of FARC, completely separate from the European efforts.
In fact, there has been a concerted effort to disparage the European initiatives, as recorded on the blog of journalist Jacques Thomet, an ex-AFP heavyweight in Latin America with Uribe sympathies who has a forthcoming book on the rescue (French babelfished into Frenglish but still comprehensible).
A news report quoted on Thomet’s blog:
And, in an August 7 post by Thomet (mile-high type in the original):
Another item from M. Thomet's brief against Mr.Gontard:
Finally, Thomet approvingly quotes a comment on a message purportedly extracted from the notorious FARC laptop:
One can see a trend here. The Colombian government is anxious to remove any impression that it pushed aside the work of patient, professional negotiators working successfully toward a release.
However, it should be pointed out that all the circumstances surrounding Betancourt’s captivity in recent months—especially the concerted effort to improve her health and appearance and including FARC’s susceptibility to being gulled by a faux helicopter transfer—all point to an impending negotiated release.
The Uribe government simply protests too much, not only disparaging the negotiators to the point of naming Jean Pierre Gontard as a terrorist asset, but also by trying to make the case that Betancourt could never have been released through negotiation.
Paradoxically, the Colombian government’s overly energetic pushback strengthens the case that a genuine and effective release negotiation was short-circuited.
The kiss of death for the Colombian version of events would be if the reports of a $20 million ransom broadcast on Swiss radio shortly after the rescue —a rumor that the Colombian government gave instant credibility by furiously accusing Gontard of the leak-- ever gain currency.
The whole issue of whether or not Colombia’s President Uribe exploited the prolonged negotiation process as a blind for his rescue operation is a sore point in Europe, and it has poisoned Colombia’s relations with France and Switzerland to a remarkable extent.
According to Le Point, Sarkozy, in particular, was especially humiliated as Uribe, turning to the United States and Israel for logistical support (the United States dedicated a spy satellite to tracking the hostages; Israel supplied eavesdropping and jamming gear, ostensibly to befuddle FARC but, since the rebels had apparently been reduced to the donkey-and-scribbled-note era of communications, the target of the surveillance may have been the hostage negotiators) while giving the back of his hand to France’s high profile effort to free Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian citizen.
Clearly Uribe, whose father died at the hands of FARC, has no use for hostage negotiators, especially when they have recourse to his detested neighbor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
It is also difficult to escape the inference that the Colombian government’s motives for the rescue went beyond humanitarian motives, and included a desire to sideline and discredit other actors that might complicate the Uribe government’s quest for a unilateral military and political solution to the FARC problem.
What better way to poison the well for future hostage negotiators than grabbing some captives in the middle of a bona fide negotiation effort, impersonating journalists and representatives of the International Red Cross, and antagonizing France and Switzerland?
The question may be asked, So What?
Ingrid Betancourt was rescued from captivity. Who cares if the Uribe government shaded the truth?
The answer depends on whether FARC is truly shattered.
If FARC survives, with its hundreds of miserable hostages in the jungle, and Colombia lurches toward another dirty war instead of reconciliation, the price of Betancourt’s bloodless rescue may, in retrospect, seem high indeed.
Bonus for American readers
John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman happened to be in Bogota the night the deal went down. Coincidence? If this was a different year, Senator McCain’s presence at this anti-terrorist triumph might have been a factor in the U.S. presidential election.
McCain confidant Lindsey Graham provided the color commentary for his hometown paper, South Carolina’s Greenville News:
With a thumbs-up for faith-based counter-terrorism, albeit of the Papish sort, or at least a salute to an obliging church’s unquestioning provision of prayer services to the nation's rulers on-demand, and, it occurs to me, a lack of curiousity about the interesting question of why the Almighty couldn't heed the invocation at a reasonable hour and instead made the bishop stay up another hour and a half in the middle of the night to make his plea, Graham concludes:
"Apparently, the guy did."
D’oh!
The generally calm and matter of fact deportment of the large team of rescuers supports the picture of an operation planned well in advance, and not a last-minute hijacking by the Uribe government of a Europe-negotiated release.
It is also clear that many of the rescuers were impersonating representatives of the International Red Cross—an embarrassing violation of international law that the Colombian government had attempted to obscure in its earlier video release—and that some of the rescuers were pretending to be members of Colombian TV station Telesur—eliciting umbrage from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The operation also aped equipment and arrangements used in two previous hostage releases midwifed by Venezuela.
It is also undeniable that the Colombian government piggybacked its rescue on extensive and recent negotiations with FARC by European representatives, who were in the jungle meeting with FARC representatives a scant five days before the rescue.
According to an AFP report, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged that he was responsible for stories in the Colombian press noting the presence in Colombia of retired French diplomat Noel Saez and Swiss hostage negotiator Jean Pierre Gontard, in order to lull FARC into a false sense of security.
Sources close to French President Sarkozy claim he instructed Saez on the request of Santos to remain in Bogota on the eve of the rescue and delay his return to the jungle.
The Colombian government is extremely keen to present the rescue as a free-standing operation that took months of planning and infiltration of high levels of FARC, completely separate from the European efforts.
In fact, there has been a concerted effort to disparage the European initiatives, as recorded on the blog of journalist Jacques Thomet, an ex-AFP heavyweight in Latin America with Uribe sympathies who has a forthcoming book on the rescue (French babelfished into Frenglish but still comprehensible).
A news report quoted on Thomet’s blog:
On July 7, the Colombian government announced that it now sought a "direct contact" with the guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to secure the release of the hostages because he had "lost confidence" in the European mediators.
"President (Alvaro Uribe of Colombia) made it clear to Mr. Jean-Pierre Gontard and Noel Saez (the Swiss and French mediators for an agreement with the guerrillas), who were in Bogota, the Colombian government 's has no confidence in their work ", had affirmed the Colombian High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo.
"I think the work for many years the two facilitators did, beyond their goodwill, produced no results, and in addition they were manipulated by the FARC," he added.
And, in an August 7 post by Thomet (mile-high type in the original):
This revelation is contained in a lengthy account just send me a high source in Colombia. I do not give details, and you will understand, because I reserve the book I write about Operation Jaque and the Colombian context.
With three agreements occurring between the FARC and the Colombian power between 2000 and 2001, 440 hostages, the vast majority of soldiers or police, were released. "Jean-Pierre Gontard had no role," insists this high source.
Mr Gontard, emissary of Switzerland since 1999, had said on July 6 last year, TSR (Télévision Suisse Romande) that (its) negotiations had resulted in the release of 360 Colombian soldiers in 2001.
Another item from M. Thomet's brief against Mr.Gontard:
On 16 July, [Colombian prosecutor] Mario Iguaran announced an investigation against the Swiss mediator in the case of the hostages. Jean-Pierre Gontard is accused of having given 500,000 dollars to the FARC guerrillas in Costa Rica. This information was contained in computers of Raul Reyes, the No. 2 FARC removed on March 1.
Finally, Thomet approvingly quotes a comment on a message purportedly extracted from the notorious FARC laptop:
Chávez has spoken Ingrid, but we have said that if we made it [the release] , We would be without cards in their hands. "Proof Alvaro Uribe that the FARC would never release Ingrid Betancourt, his posture was the only valid and that his" friends ", including Nicolas Sarkozy, have greatly mistaken.
One can see a trend here. The Colombian government is anxious to remove any impression that it pushed aside the work of patient, professional negotiators working successfully toward a release.
However, it should be pointed out that all the circumstances surrounding Betancourt’s captivity in recent months—especially the concerted effort to improve her health and appearance and including FARC’s susceptibility to being gulled by a faux helicopter transfer—all point to an impending negotiated release.
The Uribe government simply protests too much, not only disparaging the negotiators to the point of naming Jean Pierre Gontard as a terrorist asset, but also by trying to make the case that Betancourt could never have been released through negotiation.
Paradoxically, the Colombian government’s overly energetic pushback strengthens the case that a genuine and effective release negotiation was short-circuited.
The kiss of death for the Colombian version of events would be if the reports of a $20 million ransom broadcast on Swiss radio shortly after the rescue —a rumor that the Colombian government gave instant credibility by furiously accusing Gontard of the leak-- ever gain currency.
The whole issue of whether or not Colombia’s President Uribe exploited the prolonged negotiation process as a blind for his rescue operation is a sore point in Europe, and it has poisoned Colombia’s relations with France and Switzerland to a remarkable extent.
According to Le Point, Sarkozy, in particular, was especially humiliated as Uribe, turning to the United States and Israel for logistical support (the United States dedicated a spy satellite to tracking the hostages; Israel supplied eavesdropping and jamming gear, ostensibly to befuddle FARC but, since the rebels had apparently been reduced to the donkey-and-scribbled-note era of communications, the target of the surveillance may have been the hostage negotiators) while giving the back of his hand to France’s high profile effort to free Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian citizen.
Clearly Uribe, whose father died at the hands of FARC, has no use for hostage negotiators, especially when they have recourse to his detested neighbor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
It is also difficult to escape the inference that the Colombian government’s motives for the rescue went beyond humanitarian motives, and included a desire to sideline and discredit other actors that might complicate the Uribe government’s quest for a unilateral military and political solution to the FARC problem.
What better way to poison the well for future hostage negotiators than grabbing some captives in the middle of a bona fide negotiation effort, impersonating journalists and representatives of the International Red Cross, and antagonizing France and Switzerland?
The question may be asked, So What?
Ingrid Betancourt was rescued from captivity. Who cares if the Uribe government shaded the truth?
The answer depends on whether FARC is truly shattered.
If FARC survives, with its hundreds of miserable hostages in the jungle, and Colombia lurches toward another dirty war instead of reconciliation, the price of Betancourt’s bloodless rescue may, in retrospect, seem high indeed.
Bonus for American readers
John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman happened to be in Bogota the night the deal went down. Coincidence? If this was a different year, Senator McCain’s presence at this anti-terrorist triumph might have been a factor in the U.S. presidential election.
McCain confidant Lindsey Graham provided the color commentary for his hometown paper, South Carolina’s Greenville News:
"(Colombian Defense MinisterSantos) told us the whole plan," Graham said. "We were just stunned. We're at the dinner. We're sitting there thinking about this because there are three Americans involved. Right before we leave, President Uribe says it's a go for tonight.
"I found out later that the defense minister, Santos, called the bishop, the head of the Catholic church in Colombia, about 11:30 and said, 'In about 90 minutes, we want you to pray for the heart and soul of Columbia [presumably, the padre was instructed to pray for the heart and soul of Colombia, the country in South America, not Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. An understandable flub by the otherwise reliable Greenville News—ed.].' He didn't tell him what it was about, just start praying at one o'clock.
With a thumbs-up for faith-based counter-terrorism, albeit of the Papish sort, or at least a salute to an obliging church’s unquestioning provision of prayer services to the nation's rulers on-demand, and, it occurs to me, a lack of curiousity about the interesting question of why the Almighty couldn't heed the invocation at a reasonable hour and instead made the bishop stay up another hour and a half in the middle of the night to make his plea, Graham concludes:
"Apparently, the guy did."
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Afghan Shuffle
Barack Obama is acting presidential.
Via Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly blog Calpundit, we learn that Mr. Obama said this in a portion of an interview with Time’s Joe Klein entitled On negotiating with the Taliban:
"This is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq. The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally. It could not have occurred unless there were some contacts and intermediaries to peel off those who are tribal leaders, regional leaders, Sunni nationalists, from a more radical, messianic brand of insurgency. Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored."
By “presidential”, I mean addressing issues as if he were president, as opposed to regurgitating campaign-ready talking points.
As I pointed out in The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan, opening a negotiation track with the Afghan Taliban is pretty much a done deal. The facts on the ground don’t support a solely military solution, everybody else in NATO wants to open talks with the Taliban, General Petraeus is mobilizing opinion inside the U.S. to support negotiations, and the primary purpose of any surge of “two to three” brigades into Afghanistan (Senator Obama’s formula for success) would be to strengthen the West’s negotiating hand in power-sharing talks.
So, Senator Obama is not out of step with elite, in-the-know U.S. foreign policy and military opinion on Afghanistan.
However, this conciliatory consensus hasn’t filtered down to the American electorate yet.
Pne would think that, with less than two weeks to go in a presidential campaign with an increasingly desperate challenger, one might think that Senator Obama would stick with better-strong-than-wrong soundbites about how he wants bomb the mountains of eastern Afghanistan into a flat sheet of glass so he can go bowling for Taliban with Osama bin Laden’s skull.
But he didn’t. Interesting.
In another sign of the converging views and interests between the politician who is likely to become America’s next president and the powerful general who is in a position to provide him with vital national-security political cover, Senator Obama made a point of praising General Petraeus:
On General David Petraeus, with whom he has disagreed over Iraq policy:
I'm glad Petraeus is in CENTCOM ... I think he's ... not just an astute soldier, but I think he's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan.
As to what’s actually happening on the ground, U.S. General McKiernan, commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, endorsed negotiations and was then forced to do an awkward tap dance around the question of Taliban Numero Uno and bin Laden buddy Mullah Omar:
Asked whether dealing with the man who harbored Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was beyond the pale, McKiernan said, "I think that's a political decision that will ultimately be made by political leadership."
Although General McKiernan is a U.S. general who certainly follows U.S.-agreed policy in his remarks, the news report was entitled NATO does not rule out Afghan talks with Taliban, avoiding the dread capitulationism of putting “United States” and “talks with Taliban” in the same headline.
The unspoken wild card here, of course, is that General McKiernan does not speak for the 20,000 or so U.S. and other troops operating in eastern Pakistan under U.S. Central Command—which will be headed by General Petraeus come October 31.
Even if U.S. and NATO political initiatives are coordinated and the West acquires a more relaxed attitude toward Islamic fundamentalism regaining political legitimacy within Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine welcoming Mullah Omar back into the fold unless he gives up bin Laden.
Mullah Omar’s not likely to do that and, if he’s in firm control of the Taliban insurgency—which seems to be doing rather well—it will be difficult for the Karzai regime or the United States to make much headway with a political settlement.
If it turns out that the idea that the Taliban onion can be peeled away from Mullah Omar is a piece of reality-denying wishful thinking that does not reflect the facts on the ground, the United States will be in for continued difficult times.
More to the point, the people of Afghanistan and western Pakistan will be in for continued difficult times as the United States tries to gain the upper hand militarily in order to achieve a more favorable negotiating position.
Long War Journal, a website of embedded and sympathetic journalists that does a very good job of covering U.S. operations in Afghanistan, provided some interesting details on the October 22 U.S. drone attack inside Pakistan that killed quite a few people at a madrassa run by a key pro-al Qaeda tribal militant group:
"We want the Haqqanis to know we will hit them anywhere," a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal after the Sept. 8 strike on the Haqqani madrassa. The Haqqanis work closely with al Qaeda as well as conduct strikes against Afghan and Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The Manba Ulom madrassa was established by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch who has close ties with Osama bin Laden. The madrassa was used in the 1980s to train mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Haqqani family used the Manba Ulom madrassa as a training center and meeting place for senior al Qaeda leaders after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Considering that the madrassa was a Western asset in the mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s, CIA probably knows everything there is to know about this madrassa down to the number and size of latrines—heck, the CIA probably paid for and built the latrines--and the U.S. military had already attacked it before, in September of this year, it would seem unlikely that the madrassa is still used as a training center and meeting place for “high value assets”.
More likely, the U.S. military decided to plaster the madrassa once again regardless of its tactical value, either out of frustration (at that dangerous point where “hearts and minds” goes out the window and “these colors don’t run” bloody-mindedness becomes the order of the day), or because we need to increase the human and material cost of resistance to the most painful level possible as a bargaining chip when negotiations start.
This canny strategy, I believe, did not serve us particularly well when President Nixon ramped up the bombing campaign against North Vietnam in order to give the U.S. additional leverage at the Paris peace talks—and demonstrate to President Thieu America’s undying commitment to South Vietnam’s defense.
However, it did provide President Nixon with the political cover to extricate us from Vietnam.
Readers with a taste for irony will enjoy the Wikipedia account of Operation Linebacker II (over 700 B52s, 20,000 tons of bombs in eleven days; the biggest U.S. heavy bomber operation since the Second World War).
In the words of John Negroponte (!), a Kissinger aide at the time: "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."
It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama will play the Afghanistan endgame if he becomes president.
Via Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly blog Calpundit, we learn that Mr. Obama said this in a portion of an interview with Time’s Joe Klein entitled On negotiating with the Taliban:
"This is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq. The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally. It could not have occurred unless there were some contacts and intermediaries to peel off those who are tribal leaders, regional leaders, Sunni nationalists, from a more radical, messianic brand of insurgency. Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored."
By “presidential”, I mean addressing issues as if he were president, as opposed to regurgitating campaign-ready talking points.
As I pointed out in The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan, opening a negotiation track with the Afghan Taliban is pretty much a done deal. The facts on the ground don’t support a solely military solution, everybody else in NATO wants to open talks with the Taliban, General Petraeus is mobilizing opinion inside the U.S. to support negotiations, and the primary purpose of any surge of “two to three” brigades into Afghanistan (Senator Obama’s formula for success) would be to strengthen the West’s negotiating hand in power-sharing talks.
So, Senator Obama is not out of step with elite, in-the-know U.S. foreign policy and military opinion on Afghanistan.
However, this conciliatory consensus hasn’t filtered down to the American electorate yet.
Pne would think that, with less than two weeks to go in a presidential campaign with an increasingly desperate challenger, one might think that Senator Obama would stick with better-strong-than-wrong soundbites about how he wants bomb the mountains of eastern Afghanistan into a flat sheet of glass so he can go bowling for Taliban with Osama bin Laden’s skull.
But he didn’t. Interesting.
In another sign of the converging views and interests between the politician who is likely to become America’s next president and the powerful general who is in a position to provide him with vital national-security political cover, Senator Obama made a point of praising General Petraeus:
On General David Petraeus, with whom he has disagreed over Iraq policy:
I'm glad Petraeus is in CENTCOM ... I think he's ... not just an astute soldier, but I think he's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan.
As to what’s actually happening on the ground, U.S. General McKiernan, commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, endorsed negotiations and was then forced to do an awkward tap dance around the question of Taliban Numero Uno and bin Laden buddy Mullah Omar:
Asked whether dealing with the man who harbored Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was beyond the pale, McKiernan said, "I think that's a political decision that will ultimately be made by political leadership."
Although General McKiernan is a U.S. general who certainly follows U.S.-agreed policy in his remarks, the news report was entitled NATO does not rule out Afghan talks with Taliban, avoiding the dread capitulationism of putting “United States” and “talks with Taliban” in the same headline.
The unspoken wild card here, of course, is that General McKiernan does not speak for the 20,000 or so U.S. and other troops operating in eastern Pakistan under U.S. Central Command—which will be headed by General Petraeus come October 31.
Even if U.S. and NATO political initiatives are coordinated and the West acquires a more relaxed attitude toward Islamic fundamentalism regaining political legitimacy within Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine welcoming Mullah Omar back into the fold unless he gives up bin Laden.
Mullah Omar’s not likely to do that and, if he’s in firm control of the Taliban insurgency—which seems to be doing rather well—it will be difficult for the Karzai regime or the United States to make much headway with a political settlement.
If it turns out that the idea that the Taliban onion can be peeled away from Mullah Omar is a piece of reality-denying wishful thinking that does not reflect the facts on the ground, the United States will be in for continued difficult times.
More to the point, the people of Afghanistan and western Pakistan will be in for continued difficult times as the United States tries to gain the upper hand militarily in order to achieve a more favorable negotiating position.
Long War Journal, a website of embedded and sympathetic journalists that does a very good job of covering U.S. operations in Afghanistan, provided some interesting details on the October 22 U.S. drone attack inside Pakistan that killed quite a few people at a madrassa run by a key pro-al Qaeda tribal militant group:
"We want the Haqqanis to know we will hit them anywhere," a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal after the Sept. 8 strike on the Haqqani madrassa. The Haqqanis work closely with al Qaeda as well as conduct strikes against Afghan and Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The Manba Ulom madrassa was established by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch who has close ties with Osama bin Laden. The madrassa was used in the 1980s to train mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Haqqani family used the Manba Ulom madrassa as a training center and meeting place for senior al Qaeda leaders after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Considering that the madrassa was a Western asset in the mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s, CIA probably knows everything there is to know about this madrassa down to the number and size of latrines—heck, the CIA probably paid for and built the latrines--and the U.S. military had already attacked it before, in September of this year, it would seem unlikely that the madrassa is still used as a training center and meeting place for “high value assets”.
More likely, the U.S. military decided to plaster the madrassa once again regardless of its tactical value, either out of frustration (at that dangerous point where “hearts and minds” goes out the window and “these colors don’t run” bloody-mindedness becomes the order of the day), or because we need to increase the human and material cost of resistance to the most painful level possible as a bargaining chip when negotiations start.
This canny strategy, I believe, did not serve us particularly well when President Nixon ramped up the bombing campaign against North Vietnam in order to give the U.S. additional leverage at the Paris peace talks—and demonstrate to President Thieu America’s undying commitment to South Vietnam’s defense.
However, it did provide President Nixon with the political cover to extricate us from Vietnam.
Readers with a taste for irony will enjoy the Wikipedia account of Operation Linebacker II (over 700 B52s, 20,000 tons of bombs in eleven days; the biggest U.S. heavy bomber operation since the Second World War).
In the words of John Negroponte (!), a Kissinger aide at the time: "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."
It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama will play the Afghanistan endgame if he becomes president.
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