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. leads world in foreign weapons sales: report

By Jasmin Melvin Sep 6, 2009 Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States accounted for more than two-thirds of foreign weapons sales in 2008, a year in which global sales were at a three-year low, The New York Times reported on Sunday.Citing a congressional study released on Friday, the Times said the United States was involved in 68.4 percent of the global sales of arms.
U.S. weapons sales jumped nearly 50 percent in 2008 despite the global economic recession to $37.8 billion from $25.4 billion the year before.

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.

US Afghan strikes kill 100, ‘mostly civilians’

AFP, May 5, 2009

HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) – Police in Afghanistan said Wednesday that US-led air strikes against insurgents had killed 100 people, most of them civilians, in one of the deadliest such attacks in nearly eight years.

The US military opened an investigation into the operation overnight Monday into Tuesday in the remote western province of Farah, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered his government to probe reports of high civilian casualties.

“During the aerial bombardment and ground operations, more than 100 people have died,” western Afghanistan police spokesman Abdul Rauf Ahmadi told AFP, basing his information on reports from police, the Red Cross and locals.

“Twenty-five to 30 of them are Taliban, including from Chechnya and Pakistan, and the rest are civilians including children, women and elderly people,” he said.

Teams from the Afghan government, international forces and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would travel to the area to investigate, he added.

Deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli said that he had seen the bodies of 20 children brought by villagers to the provincial capital, also called Farah.

Advisor: ‘US Needs to Call off Drone Strikes in Pak’

Asia News International, May 3, 2009

Lahore – The top adviser to the US army chief in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen, has observed that the US drone strikes in Pakistan are creating more enemies than eliminating them, and hence, needed to be “called off.”

Responding to a congressman on what the US government should do in Pakistan, he said: “We need to call off the drones.”

The Daily Times quoted Kilcullen, as saying that he has no objection to killing “bad guys” in Pakistan.

However, he added that the strikes were creating more enemies than they eliminate.

Kilcullen said that the drone strikes, which were “highly unpopular”, gave rise to a feeling of anger that unites the population with the Taliban and could lead to “loss of Pakistani government control over its own population”.

He said that insurgents used the drone strikes to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment.

Another problem, Kilcullen noted, was “using robots from the air looks both cowardly and weak”

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

The Daily Show – Full Metal Budget

A humorous yet critical look at Obama’s defense budget.

Originally aired: 4/8/09

The Real News – Obama’s Military Budget

While media plays up program cuts, total defense budget surpasses Bush by $20 B

FromTheRealNews.com