Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama’s Afghanistan Plan

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment (Juancole.com)

1. Obama’s plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than doubled and quality results still obtained?

2. Obama’s plan assumes that there can be a truly national Afghan army. But the current one is disproportionately Tajik and signally lacks troops from the troubled Helmand and Qandahar provinces. Unless the ethnic tensions are eased, training a big army could well provoke an anti-Tajik backlash in Pashtun regions that feel occupied.

3. Obama’s goal to “break the Taliban’s momentum” may well fail. Only 20 percent of insurgencies in modern times are defeated in a decisive military manner.

Meet the Afghan Army – Is It a Figment of Washington’s Imagination?

By Ann Jones 9/20/09

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.

U.S. Faces Resentment in Afghan Region

An Afghan village elder rages and points his walking stick at U.S. soldiers after a recent raid killed 16 civilians in his village

They look at the coalition as the enemy, because they have not seen anything good from them in seven or eight years

CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times, July 2, 2009

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.

Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.

Afghan Prez urges US to stop strikes

 

 

Afghans search through the rubble for loved ones and possessions.

2009/05/08 22:50:52 GMT

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called on the US to halt air strikes in his country, following an attack that reportedly killed scores of civilians.

Mr Karzai, who is in Washington, told CNN air strikes were “not acceptable”.

Afghan officials say more than 100 civilians died when US jets attacked targets in the western Farah province.

Beyond the Hype of Instability, What’s the Real Situation in Pakistan?

“The hype about Pakistan is very sinister and mysterious and makes no sense to someone who actually knows the country.”

Juan Cole, Informed Comment, April 26, 2009

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan’s security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren’t these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can’t see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Al Jazeera Strikes Back at Pentagon, Releases Unedited Footage of US Soldiers’ ‘Bible Study’ in Afghanistan

Jeremy Scahill, Huffington Post, May 5, 2009

A day after the Pentagon accused Al Jazeera of being ‘irresponsible and inappropriate’ for broadcasting the ‘hunt for Jesus’ in Afghanistan footage, the network releases unedited tapes.

Hours after Al Jazeera first broadcast a video showing US soldiers in Afghanistan being instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population, the Pentagon shot back. It charged that Al Jazeera had “grossly misrepresent[ed] the truth.” Col. Greg Julian, told Al Jazeera: “Most of this is taken out of context … this is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism.”

Now, Al Jazeera and the man who filmed the controversial material are striking back. The network has just released unedited and unaltered footage of US soldiers in ‘bible study’ in Afghanistan. Jazeera describes it as “Extended footage shot by Brian Hughes, a US documentary maker and former member of the US military who spent several days in Bagram near Kabul.”

The Rachel Maddow Show – Obama’s Friday News Dumps

in an attempt to minimize criticism, the Obama administration has been releasing unfavorable decisions on friday nights to avoid the news cycle.

-End of the Iraq war will involve up to 50,000 residual troops
-Disclosure forms that show top economic adviser Larry Summers made millions from the hedge fund industry
-Will continue the argument advanced by the bush administration that prisoners being held indefinitely at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan should not be able to challenge their imprisonment
-Now appealing judge’s Bagram decision against the Obama administration

Thousands Flee Bomb Attacks by US Drones

An unmanned US "Predator" drone passes overhead near the border with Pakistan.

By Daud Khattakin and Christina Lamb, April 5, 2009, The Sunday Times (UK)

AMERICAN drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

Ten Ways the US is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq

Barack Obama meets with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai during the U.S. presidential campaign

Friday, April 03, 2009
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

1. Exaggerating the threat. An Afghan army foot patrol was attacked by guerrillas in Helmand Province on Wednesday, according to AP. US and Afghan soldiers responded, engaging in a firefight. Then the US military called in an air strike on the Taliban, killing 20 of them. On Tuesday, a similar airstrike had taken out 30 guerrillas.

It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder why the Taliban (or whoever these guys in Helmand were) are considered such a big threat that the full might of NATO is needed to deal with them. They have no air force, no artillery, no tanks. They are just small bands, apparently operating in platoons, who, whenever they mass in large enough numbers to stand and fight, can just be turned into red mist from the air.

The secrets of Obama’s surge in Afghanistan- “Its not about terrorism.”

“So what if this has nothing to do with terrorists but, number one, Cold War mentality in action, a Vietnam-style surge expanding the war, then to Cambodia and now to Pakistan?”

A commentary by Pepe Escobar about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan

From TheRealNews.com.

Spanish Judge Accuses Six Top Bush Officials of Torture

Revelations of torture and humiliation of US captives horrified the world.

Legal moves may force Obama’s government into starting a new inquiry into abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib

By Julian Borger and Dale Fuchs, March 28, 2009 by the Guardian/UK 

MADRID – Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay.

The Rachel Maddow Show – The Drone Wars

Rachel Maddow and Juan Cole discuss the Obama Administration’s escalation of military activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.