When I Go Forwards You Go Backwards...And Somewhere We Will Meet.

Title lyrics from Radiohead's "Electioneering."

Last week, I lamented the inattention to the Afghan election held on August 20th. It's not just the widespread fraud that infuriates, but the blatant disregard for it in the country that is supposed to be pushing democracy there. The silence of benefactors goes a lot further in illustrating to Afghanis where they stand than all the propaganda leaflets in the world. (Indeed, one Afghan girl was recently killed by such a drop from a British plane.)

But the issue here is more than simply inattention, it's a dedicated effort on the part of those charged with ensuring a fair vote to protect the exact opposite outcome. In an op-ed in the Washington Post and in an interview with Amy Goodman, the fired UN official Peter Galbraith indicated that the dispute that led to his recall was "not over how to handle electoral fraud, but over whether the UN should handle it." In other words, though it is clear to all that fraud occurred (Karzai has admitted as much), the UN and the Electoral Complaints Commission has tried to take a stance of non-interference. Such a stance would seem to call into question their very existence, but they don't seem troubled by such logic.

Galbraith:

First, in advance of the election, he [Kai Eide, head of the Afghan mission]—when I was trying to reduce the number of the ghost polling stations, he ordered me to stop doing that, after the Afghan ministers complained about it, although, of course, they were working for President Karzai, who would turn out to be the beneficiary of the fraud.

At another stage in the process, we had collected very substantial data on fraud and turnout. This was done by the UN staff at considerable personal risk. Afghanistan is a dangerous place to operate. And then, we wanted to do what our mandate is, which is to support the Afghan institutions, turn this evidence over to the Election Complaints Commission. He ordered the mission not to turn over the evidence, to sit on it. And then, when the Independent Election Commission, which was really a pro-Karzai body, decided to abandon its safeguards, he objected when I intervened with them to try to get them to keep the safeguards.

So, the situation is not only a plan of non-interference after the fact, but a concerted effort on the part of international observers to ensure that fraud was allowed to take place in the run-up to the election. Of course, electoral fraud happens all over the world. I make no claims to the contrary, but there are two things to note here. First, the US has a serious vested interest in propagating a fair democratic system. To fail in that endeavor would be to fail in the claims of our leaders. (Not that I'm suggesting you take them at their word.)

But, in American foreign policy, results are never really near the top of the discussion board. What matters is what our enlightened leaders claim (and the media parrot), nothing else. Only under this facade could one miserable failure lead to another, and then another, without any question as to motives or success. In the last 8 years, all the US and its allies have accomplished in the Middle East is to replace two corrupt regimes with equally-corrupt substitutes. Death and violence have not gone down, infrastructure has not been re-built, nowhere is there quantifiable evidence of progress. Yet, here we stand suggesting again that a couple thousand more soldiers and Afghanistan will be a vast Utopia, freeing our forces up for the inevitable three-peat in Iran.

But it's not just ineptitude here. There is an active conflict between those that are working for fair elections, like Galbraith, and those who are instead dedicated to preventing them. One need look no further than the rules for the fraud investigation released today by the ECC:

Afghanistan's U.N.-backed election watchdog will treat presidential candidates as equally likely to be guilty of vote fraud in suspicious cases, new rules issued on Monday show, a move that may ensure a win for Hamid Karzai.

[...]

The ECC published its recount rules on Monday, saying candidates would have ballots nullified in proportion to the total number of ballots they have in boxes considered suspicious, regardless of which candidate perpetrated the fraud.

The arithmetic appears to favor Karzai.

Under the recount rules, ballot boxes considered suspicious are grouped into six categories according to the grounds for the suspicion, but are not separated according to which candidate benefitted from the suspected fraud.

What this means, essentially, is that any fraudulent votes for Karzai will be given the same weight as legitimate votes for Abdullah Abdullah. There will be no attempt to only eliminate fraudulent votes, but rather to take votes away from both parties, even those not suspected of fraud.

In other words, the ECC has constructed rules to ensure a win for Karzai.

Again, this has more to do with the future of the country than one disputed election. What is happening is the propping-up of a corrupt regime which many Afghans will view as illegitimate. There is only one possible outcome of such a policy, and that is continued violence and destruction.

What US foreign policy never accepts, though, is that success is not produced simply by quantity of forces. This being the case, the root causes of violence and war are never addressed. Propagating corruption can never be viewed as a root cause, as such a view would lead some to believe that the US is not inerrant, which is wholly unacceptable. There is no reason to believe an alternate worldview will make an appearance any time soon, so expect the fighting in Afghanistan to continue for an indefinite future, no matter how many "surge" forces are sent into the killing fields.




Related posts:

On Priorities September 29, 2009
There's Always a Siren...Singing You to Shipwreck September 22, 2009
Afghanistan: Right War or No, It's Still War July 21, 2008

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On Priorities

Updated below @ 1820, 9/29

The American political scene will never be accused of being held captive by perspective. When even something as basic as "which of these numbers is larger?" can't be harnessed by the blathering press and political leaders, one can hardly expect to find the ability for relative comparisons running rampant. Two disparate issues stand out for me as cases-in-point: election fraud vis Iran and Afghanistan, and the Defund ACORN Act.

Everyone knows about the election fraud in Iran. It was on every channel for nearly a month, demonstrating the journalistic acumen of the American media (re: Bringing you the news in 140 characters or less!), and proving once and for all Iranian leaders are the evilest of all evil-doers the world has ever seen. Granted, said leaders are not great ambassadors for democracy (no one would make such a claim), but the elections were in the news for a reason. The same reason the brutal Egyptian and Saudi regimes don't make the news.

Compare that coverage with that of electoral fraud in Afghanistan. It's okay if you haven't heard of it. Not many have. Why would you? The person accused of fraud is our guy. That's enough to keep him under wraps. If electoral shenanigans were mentioned, it was only to point out Taliban violence. CNN did not do wall-to-wall coverage on things like this:

The shaky footage shows two election monitors inspecting a book of 100 ballot papers that are still stitched together, as they were intended to arrive at the polling station in rural Afghanistan. But something is wrong; instead of being pristine, ready for the voter to make his or her mark, each paper bears a large blue tick next to the name of one candidate: Hamid Karzai.

As the monitors flick through the pad, the back of the ballots clearly show the authorisation stamp of election monitors, validating them as votes ready to be put in the ballot box and counted.

"We found it the day after the elections," one of the monitors in the footage told me. "They were trying to put it in one of the [ballot] boxes but didn't have time, so we took it home and filmed it. If we had given it back to the election committee they would have used it again, so we burned it, but filmed it to protect ourselves if they come and threaten us."

Or this:

The Afghan elections, already tainted by widespread accusations of misconduct and fraud, received another body blow Wednesday when the head of the European Union's election-monitoring commission said that as many as 1.1 million votes cast in the vote were "suspect."

The latest dark cloud over the Aug. 20 election came as Afghanistan's election commission released a preliminary vote tally Wednesday showing President Hamid Karzai with 54.6 percent of the votes cast – enough to avoid a runoff if the total stands up to one official recount already launched and to mounting doubts like those from the EU.

The EU's general depiction of fraud was bad enough. But even more damaging to the Western-backed government of President Karzai was the finding by Phillippe Morillon, head of the EU monitor, that more than one-third of the votes Mr. Karzai received in his reelection bid – 1.1 million of about 3 million votes for Karzai – could be fraudulent and must be investigated.

None of this minimizes Taliban violence, but it does clearly indicate that American views on the world are guided more by a commitment to its allies and stock assumptions than democracy, despite public claims. President Obama has parlayed his campaign speeches into an Afghanistan policy still riding the opinion of Afghanistan as the good war. Meanwhile, the world's beacon of democracy has attached itself to the falling star of a loose coalition of corrupt warlords, most of whom are politicians in name alone. Any lingering notion that the Afghan government holds its own people in any due regard would have fallen away if such fraud was reported with the same fervency as it was regarding Iran.

The furor surrounding ACORN is better covered, mainly because it fits the tabloid model of American journalism. ACORN has always been a target of Republicans, but who would have thought the end would come with a topic so dear to their hearts: prostitution. David Vitter is surely proud.

Consider the thought process here. The defunding act would have no chance were it not for two random ACORN staffers doling out some helpful information on how to get in the flesh business. Okay, but consider the implication here. If followed to its logical conclusion, this would mean that any company that had any employee commit a federal offense would soon be off the government roll. Like these companies, for instance.

While we await that action with baited breath, let's consider a few of these offenses which might rise a little higher on the immorality of the scale. Maybe electrocuting US soldiers.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.

One study called electrocution "the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq." And what bastion of liberalism made such a claim? The US Army. Nearly every facility constructed in Iraq by KBR/Halliburton contained dangerous electrical wiring. But, rest assured, putting American soldiers in mortal danger has not hurt the company's bottom line. Nor has the fact that its employees engaged in the gang rape and imprisonment of a female employee.

Then there's Blackwater. In the past months, Blackwater's compound has been raided by the ATF for illegal weapons trafficking, been accused of tax evasion through offshore havens, employed young Iraqi girls for oral sex, and had employees indicted on manslaughter. Yet, 90 percent of its income continues to come from the government.

So let's not kid ourselves as to the magnitude of these crimes here. If the actions of random employees loses a organization government funding, it's only fair to ask when rampant corruption and misdeeds will have their day in the self-aggrandizing Congressional theater. The bill itself states that the organization must be involved in elections, but surely the Republicans leading the charge don't intend for us to consider funneling millions into campaign coffers fitting the bill. But occasionally we may have to accept English at face value, rather than waiting for the political/media filter to deliver it to us.


Update:

The US has decided that Karzai will remain president regardless of final results.

The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent.

Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it.

The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt.

[...]

Mrs Clinton told Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan Foreign Minister, that...Mr Karzai would remain President even if investigations now under way cut his share of the first-round vote to below 50 per cent.

Better get something to wash that democracy down with, Afghanistan. It's a bit bitter.


Related:

Supporting the Troops Through No-Bid Contracts May 6, 2008
When You Were Here Before...Couldn't Look You in the Eye August 9, 2009

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There's Always a Siren...Singing You to Shipwreck

Title lyrics from Radiohead's "There There."

That, in general, people are treating General MacChrystal's recently released/leaked report on the status of the conflict in Afghanistan as if it were an influx of new and much-needed information is curious. It is decidedly not.

Most everyone without a personal stake in governance and/or fellating those that do so have recognized for some time that US actions in Afghanistan are far from the drumline/fife cavalcade that many Americans still seem to picture when they imagine war. Battalions helpfully dressed in red wool, civilians avoiding the conflict, marching in straight lines. Sadly, those of us that have put down Cornwallis' theories on war and examined the world as it currently exists aren't typically asked for our input.

Only under these circumstances would the revelation that Afghanis might enjoy a mortar-free trip to the market, or a government that doesn't make the US Congress look as corrupt as a quilting circle, or the occasion spurt of electricity (preferably not using their groins as a conductor) seem anything of the sort. These are not revelations, these are common human traits. Only Americans seem to find surprising the reality that even Brown people like to see their sons and daughters grow up. Only their concerns are more centered on little Joey retaining four limbs than whether he's better at soccer than the son of the person in the next cubicle.

Even in those rare bursts of half-realization, such as MacChrystal's report, the pull of conventional wisdom (read: mental laziness) is still too great to expect any proliferation of such epiphanies. And that's discounting the inevitability of some celebrity dying, getting divorced or shopping for pants taking its place for the news lead.

In addition to finding such mundane human realities as the desire to live vexing, Americans love to whitewash even such trivialities in even more trite catch phrases and slogans. We consider "hearts-and-minds" a tremendously profound strategy, but see upon examination that it is nothing of the sort.

When we say we want to win the "hearts and minds," we mean not that we seek to learn their values and live up to them. We mean that we want to convince them that the values we're are attempting to impose upon them are accepted silently and graciously. This is not a small distinction, and it has confused the "best-and-brightest" since the early Sixties.

We consider the populations of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan so backward and uneducated that we truly believe that they will find relief--joy, even--when they pick up a leaflet extolling American virtues next to the burning rubble of their meager existence. For the US government/military, it is inconceivable that such people might consider the realities of their surroundings when deciding how much credence to give to America propaganda. To the US government, winning hearts and minds means making a flashier leaflet, not a cessation of explosion and death.

Unlike Americans, most foreign populations are aware of the state of their government. We get temporarily bent out of shape at minor infractions upon decorum ('You lie.'), but we never examine the edifice, itself. Afghanis, on the other hand, know exactly who their government is. And it's not Hamid Karzai. They're well aware that they are governed by a cadre of corrupt, often competing, warlords, many of which receive American support.

Temporary incursions into pseudo-logical thinking like MacChrystal's only serve to make the general lack of such that much more luminous.

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When You Were Here Before...Couldn't Look You in the Eye

Now a full-term pregnancy removed from the most recent exercise in choice between white and eggshell (and I don't mean race), it's safe to reflect the 2008 torrent of change that swept all good coffee-drinking, Idol-watching, Tweet-overloading Americans into a New Age of togetherness and prosperity. No?

One of the most striking differences between the current regime of corporate-imperial bedfellows and the previous one is nuance. So dedicated is Obama to the delicate art of subtlety, that one might miss all the overwhelming change taking place beneath our noses. But since Obama presented his campaign as a 180 from the Bush presidency, it's only fair that we struggle to find some evidence of this in practice.

In Iraq, a promise to extricate American forces from Iraq became removing them from Baghdad intermittently, forming a menacing ring around the city with the understanding that they could rush back in anytime necessary. The declaration of necessity of course being at the discretion of the Americans. Problem solved. Clashing warlords, honor killings, ethnic cleansing and the myriad other realities that make Iraq the most dangerous country in the world are not addressed.

Having played his card in Iraq, Obama was able to ensure smooth functioning of the military-industrial machine by funneling more money into an even more depressing and hopeless situation in Afghanistan. Former member of Afghan parliament, Malalai Joya:

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops.

In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".

Again we see an American foreign policy that pays no attention to the reality of the situation. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, Americans are not fighting a foreign army susceptible to surrender and treaty. It's fighting an amorphous collection of warlords, the supply of which is endless, while the misery of Afghan life continues unabated by the well-oiled machinations of the very democracy we purport to defend.

And then there's Blackwater. (Yes, their PR flack has renamed the company Xe, but as Tyler Durden said, "Sticking feathers in your ass does not make you a chicken.") For all the platitudes we heap on the American armed forces, little has been made of the truth that in Iraq, the ratio of US forces and private security forces (a euphemism for mercenaries) has run about 1:1, and is likely to rise as US force levels are drawn down.

One of the recurring themes in American foreign policy is the fantasy that the foreign populations directly affected by the many proxies the US uses to fight its wars, overt and secret, are as ignorant of the effect as the ever-distracted American population is. Chileans were never in doubt as to the backing of Pinochet. Nicaraguans knew who was backing the Contras. And Iraqis know from whence came Blackwater.

In many ways, Blackwater is the face of American foreign policy in Iraq, which makes it all the more sad that Americans know so little about their representatives. In March, 2008, I discussed the granting of immunity to Blackwater agents who shot indiscriminately into a crowd of innocent Iraqis. This, of course, left no doubt in the minds of Iraqis as to where they stood in the benevolent American enterprise.

In that same essay, I noted that Obama refused to rule out the use of such extrajudicial bands of marauding crusaders. Huzzah, he followed through on something! Name change or no, the song remains the same:

The two declarations are each five pages long and contain a series of devastating allegations concerning Erik Prince and his network of companies, which now operate under the banner of Xe Services LLC. Among those leveled by Doe #2 is that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe”:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Among the additional allegations made by Doe #1 is that “Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq.” He states that he personally witnessed weapons being “pulled out” from dog food bags. Doe #2 alleges that “Prince and his employees arranged for the weapons to be polywrapped and smuggled into Iraq on Mr. Prince’s private planes, which operated under the name Presidential Airlines,” adding that Prince “generated substantial revenues from participating in the illegal arms trade.”

Doe #2 states: “Using his various companies, [Prince] procured and distributed various weapons, including unlawful weapons such as sawed off semi-automatic machine guns with silencers, through unlawful channels of distribution.” Blackwater “was not abiding by the terms of the contract with the State Department and was deceiving the State Department,” according to Doe #1.

This is the face of American foreign policy in Iraq. That Obama is considered to be at the left fringe of American politics in that area is startling, and says a lot less about him than it does us.

And then there's Somalia:

For as the history of American foreign policy in the last 60 years has clearly shown us, there has never been an internal conflict in any country of the world that was not actually, deep down, a direct threat to all the sweet American babies sleeping in their cribs.

The interim Somali president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed -- an Islamist who only a few years ago was considered by Washington as, well, an evil maniac in league with al Qaeda -- agreed with [Hillary] Clinton, saying that al-Shabab aims to "make Somalia a ground to destabilize the whole world." This would be the same al-Shabab that Ahmed has spent most of his presidency trying to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with. (Where's that scorecard again?)

As usual, the AP story buries some of the most blazing, salient facts way down in the uncritical regurgitation of official rhetoric. But credit where it's due, the story does finally note that the new American assistance is not confined to stuff that can kill more Somalis; it also includes - wait for it again -- U.S. military "advisors" to help "train" the forces of the ever-collapsing transitional government.

Clinton also shook a sword at neighboring Eritrea, accusing it of supporting al-Shabab and "interfering" in Somalia's internal affairs. This, while she was announcing the delivery of 80 tons of American weapons to be poured into Somalia's internal affairs.

Critics on the American Right often use the term "moral relativism" as an epithet. The meaning of the term, that standards of right and wrong should not be influenced by time or culture, seems innocuous until you consider that they mean precisely the opposite of its intended application. Rather than extolling a universal standard of right and wrong, they imply that such standards can only be extrapolated from a situation based upon the actors. America, right. Everyone else, wrong.

Of course, that the Obama administration is carrying the Bush administration's water on this one is not at all surprising to those of us that paid attention to the words of his campaign rather than the ease with which he delivered them.

Many more examples to follow.

Related:

Contracting Obama March 3, 2008
Afghanistan: Right War or No, It's Still War July 21, 2008
Fumbling in the Dark August 2, 2008

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Pentagon Finally Concedes Point on Pakistan

It very rarely happens, but it is refreshing and a (shameful) ego boost of sorts when the Pentagon finally admits publicly something you've been arguing in isolation for quite some time. This is just what has happened in regards to the US's Pakistan policy in Congressional testimony Wednesday by Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen.

In mid-July I wrote:

The most glaring difficulty is that the Taliban stronghold they seek to root out is not in Afghanistan, but Pakistan. Thus, regardless of the number of troops stationed in Afghanistan, whether increased by 10 or 50 thousand, the same issue of Pakistani sovereignty exists. The Pakistani government has shown no willingness to allow NATO forces to conduct cross-border raids, so any suggestion that the Surge forces would do so would come as an affront to the wishes of our 'ally.'

Musharraf's hold on power grows weaker by the day, which has led to the Pakistanis remaining lax on raids in the FATA and NWP in order to avoid stoking a fire which might drive him from the seat of government. Allowing NATO to conduct itself in Pakistan with autonomy would surely be unpopular among the populace and put Musharraf in greater peril.

Musharraf is now out of the picture, but the US is no closer to forming a plan to deal with the Pakistani reality, and the Pakistanis are no closer to allowing the US operational freedom within FATA, explicitly warning the US on Wednesday to keep its troops out of Pakistan. On Wednesday, Mullen finally admitted what those of us with a foothold in reality have realized for some time now.

Mullen said he was "looking at a new, more comprehensive strategy for the region" that would cover both sides of the border, including Pakistan's tribal areas.

"These two nations are inextricably linked in a common insurgency that crosses the border between them," Mullen said.

"We can hunt down and kill extremists as they cross over the border from Pakistan ... but until we work more closely with the Pakistani government to eliminate the safe havens from which they operate, the enemy will only keep coming."

If admission is the first step toward a solution, the next step will be infinitely harder. The US must find a way to deal with the Pakistani aversion to US operations there, and failure to do so (which seems probable at this point) will only result in the continuation of an ineffectual Afghanistan policy no matter how many troops the current or future president deploys there.

As I've said many times before, the Pakistanis are not neutral observers in this instance, as their security service -- the ISI -- has armed, funded, and cultivated the extremists working out of the border region for many years.

The ISI has long associated itself with anti-American militants, whom they utilized to advance their shared aims on targets in Afghanistan and India. Now, the ISI is drunk with American funds and free to pursue those long-standing policies with even greater fervor, and the US as usual is surprised to find that not everyone who accepts funding is necessarily as dedicated to orthodoxy as we would like. To that end, the ISI is believed to have played a significant role in last month's bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

In his book, Descent Into Chaos, Ahmed Rashid even details an instance where the US was asked to pause offensive strikes to allow ISI agents to extricate themselves from Afghanistan where they were fighting alongside the Taliban. Though the president likes to deal solely in religious-style absolutes, the multi-faceted relationships in Pakistan prove yet again that this habit can only lead to folly, as the line between friend and foe is inexorably blurred in reality.

In August, I also insisted that the solution to Afghanistan was more economic than military, a suggestion that seemed at desperate odds with administrative policy, a voice in the wilderness. Consider Admiral Mullen a late invitee to the party:

The officials said the West should do more to help Afghans with new investments in roads and other infrastructure, education and crop assistance.

"These are the keys to success in Afghanistan," said Mullen. "We cannot kill our way to victory."

I refuse to believe that a solitary man in the Midwest had a fuller picture of the situation in Afghanistan than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, leaving only the alternative that the administration has known the reality of the situation for a substantial period of time, but continued to maintain a facade until yesterday. Why, then, were they so adverse to expressing what many already understood?

Because in American foreign policy, reality has little bearing on the running narrative. What matters is not what is happening, but rather what the ruling class wants, or needs to happen. Suggesting that we "can't kill our way to victory" is surely the rational outlook on the situation, but it doesn't do anything to build and support the profit opportunities for the defense sector. What little money that was spent on reconstruction ended up in the hands of American contractors, though often they failed to fulfill their contractual obligations. Billions were given to companies like Bechtel and Halliburton to build schools and infrastructure with little to show for that investment.

Far from an investment in Afghanistan, the "reconstruction" money instead served as a form of socialized capitalism, where the American tax payers foot the bill for private profits, lending credence to the indication that George Bush is perhaps the biggest socialist in America. Running political narratives make that seem laughable on the surface, but a glance at the last eight years reveals a continuous flow of government money into private hands with little, if any, oversight or consequence. The Bush administration is not for lower government spending in the slightest, they merely differ on to whom tax money will be distributed, pushing that reality into the shadows of a rhetorical fantasy world which posits that they are against such spending.

Denying until Wednesday the reality of the situation in Pakistan is an integral part of that framework, which requires that platitudes and nonsensical euphemisms be given precedence over honest and objective assessment. While it is probably true that Admiral Mullen himself did not refrain from such observations to serve corporate needs, he understands very well the environment in which he works and who it is he serves.

Aside from the economic element, there remains the purely political element, even more accentuated in an election year. Republicans must maintain at all costs the specter of "winning" the war in Afghanistan. Whether US activities there constitute a war at all, or how precisely one could define "winning" or "victory" are unimportant. All that matters is that the traditional political theme concerning national defense be maintained. Republicans must be presented as safe, Democrats as a danger. Everything else fades in comparison.

That Republican rule has left us no safer, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are both far from confirming even the vaguest notions of "victory" are immaterial to the argument. Indeed, all appeals to reality, reason, and logic constitute little, if any, of the domestic argument of foreign policy. To the extent that foreign policy is even broached, discussion of the topic always revolves around the typical roles, defined for ages despite all available evidence to the contrary, and no amount of empirical evidence will be allowed to interfere with the freight train that is a political fable taken for granted.

Denial of reality is simply part of Admiral Mullen's job, as integral a part as any other, for it is his task to put an apolitical face on a political view of the world. As we have seen in the case of Admiral Fox, deviation from the script can cost jobs, position, and prestige, but Mullen's testimony on Wednesday indicates that the facade, so meticulously maintained for seven years, is beginning to wear away, even if it will have minimal effect on the domestic political agenda.


Related:

Fumbling in the Dark, August 2
Surge II: Afghanistan, July 15

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Obama's Magic Wand

One of the many long-ignored realities in the Afghanistan theater is the continuing support of the ISI for Islamic militants, both in the FATA and Kashmir, which has endured for decades as a buffer against Indian influence in the region. Because Bush is only capable of seeing things in terms of absolutes, Musharraf and the Pakistani military were never confronted on their double dealing, and the problem was allowed to fester.

Now, both presidential candidates have announced plans to send a couple more brigades in, yet still have not addressed any of the central inhibitions of progress. Obama, in keeping with his sorcerer theme, is convinced that he can succeed in getting Pakistan and India to put their decades-long enmity behind them, thus eliminating the need for supporting Islamic militants and leading to a general aura of good tidings and cheer in the region. A farcical foreign policy promise if ever there was one.

Obama is a capable speaker to be sure, but wooing scores of college freshmen is not the same as ending generational conflict between neighboring nuclear powers. Unless he has a plan for Kashmir which would satisfy both sides up his sleeve, the mere suggestion of easing tensions to the point he suggests is lunacy. Especially now.

The latest crisis in Kashmir has turned that logic on its head. After a dispute over land snowballed into some of the biggest protests since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989, India and Pakistan are back at each other’s throats, hurling allegations at each other. Rather than asking whether the two countries can be persuaded to make a durable peace, the question now is how bad the relationship can get. “India-Pakistan relations are getting perilously close to ground zero,” writes former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar in an Asia Times article.

Add in the domestic political instability in Pakistan, and relations between India and Pakistan have probably not been so combustible since they declared a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in November 2003.

In other words, the plan is dead on arrival. That would be a problem for Obama if the American electorate were the slightest bit concerned about actual policy details, but un-fortified platitudes pass for foreign policy in the world of campaigning, which begs the question: What have we learned in the last eight years?

The last eight years have seen a disastrous foreign policy predicated on the same empty rhetoric, which, while different in tone, was still based entirely on the premise that no one would examine it too closely. We've witnessed the calamity wrought by a foreign policy long on promises and ideas but short on tactical details and historical literacy. We don't need four more.

McCain's bluster is easy to spot, a feat helped in no small part by his proclivity for uttering absurdities detectable by even the most geographically and culturally illiterate among us. Obama, though, has succeeded in dressing his foreign policy up in enough of a disguise that it comes off as deeper than it actually is. He understands the workings of the world infinitely better than McCain, but at the root, his foreign policy would be less a break from the typical American fare than we'd like to pretend.

One would be hard-pressed to find any variance between Bush, McCain, and Obama on the topic of Georgia, just as Obama's Afghanistan policy is largely mirrored by McCain's. What is clear, is that once in office, Obama will most likely settle into the same refrain seen for the last century in American foreign policy: A huge rhetorical structure of freedom and democracy all standing on a shaky foundation of ignorance of the realities of foreign lands.

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Review: Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos

Typically, American books on foreign policy, be they from the right or the left, see every foreign policy endeavor through the eyes of the American political system, tying action half a world away to the sturm and derang of the two-party system here. Very rarely are we treated to books about foreign nations by scholars actually acquainted with those nations and their inhabitants, and as a result we remain fatally detached from the realities of most foreign conflicts.

Ahmad Rashid, however, has lived in Pakistan for the whole of his life, and has journalistic and personal relationships with personalities on both sides of the various conflicts enveloping Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the whole of Central Asia. His ability to elicit frank statements from both Hamid Karzai and members of various Islamic terrorist organizations gives the reader a glimpse of that world rarely offered to the Western Hemisphere. His freedom from the American political system is a definite bonus, as he is under no obligation to artificially tailor all his arguments to suit its bi-polar nature, and is free to simply recount the facts and realities of the situation.

The overwhelming theme that I took away from the book is the continual doublespeak on the part of the ISI and the Pakistani military. Musharraf has welcomed American aid in all its forms -- debt forgiveness, cash, and arms -- while presiding over a nation that has continued its long-standing cozy relationship with Islamic terror.

The Taliban maintained power in Afghanistan in no small part because the ISI allowed it to. Even as the American bombing campaign wore on, the Pakistanis asked for a brief reprieve so that they might escort the ISI agents still aiding the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis have allowed the Taliban safe haven in Waziristan and refrained from turning its members over to NATO forces, choosing instead to collect Arabs and call them al Qaeda. The ISI also believes itself to be combating growing Indian influence in the region and still maintains a vast expanse of madrassas in which to train future Kashmiri militants or fight the Indian presence in Afghanistan.

For its part, the US has for the most part avoided calling Musharraf on any of it, afraid that doing so might result in the loss of the strongest ally in the region. But, as Rashid exhaustively details, Pakistan has remained an ally in name only. The Pakistanis have welcomed American aid and arms willfully, to be sure, but when it comes time to fulfill their end of the bargain they have failed catastrophically.

In Afghanistan Proper, the US chose to fund various warlords in lieu of sending its own troops, resulting in a weak central government and even weaker security. The side project in Iraq not only siphoned off troops, but space-bound intelligence apparatuses as well, leaving the return of the Taliban essentially unchecked for years.

Rashid's book is full of immense detail and exhibits a wealth of knowledge about the region one would be hard-pressed to find in any contemporary American writer. Anyone who looks to better understand the true components of the resurgence of the Taliban and the failure of the Pakistanis to thwart an al Qaeda safe haven owes themselves the purchase of Descent Into Chaos.

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Fumbling in the Dark

Much as a sixteen year old would fumble and grope in the dark when presented with his first potential catch, the overwhelming legacy of the Bush administration's newfound legal and logistical toys is one of incoherency and incompetence. Although the government has had more tools at its disposal, and less incursions from the Constitution, than any previous administration, it has parlayed those advantages into a bumbling policy which invariably fails to heed the reality of world affairs, is prone to distractions, and has accomplished next to nothing, if not in fact overseeing a growth in the virility of terrorism around the world.

Nothing exemplifies this reality more than the thorny relationship with Pakistan, the earliest and most enduring of the international relationships forged after the WTC attacks in 2001, a relationship which brings into clear focus the inability of the Bush administration to perceive any specifics in foreign affairs and its propensity to rely instead on a worldview consisting only of good versus evil, us versus them. This worldview become prohibitive in practice, all but eliminating the ability to discern the difference between the population and leaders of Pakistan and its intelligence apparatus, the ISI.

A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.

The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.

[...]

The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

It defies credulity to infer that the CIA is just now getting wind of this relationship, but it is not hard to believe that any concerns among the US intelligence structure may well have been downplayed by the Bush administration. Although polarization is a prevailing curse of American politics, it tends to ebb in the area of foreign policy, but the current power structure has seen a reluctance to rely on the career bureaucrats in agencies like the CIA and seek the substitution of analysts and advisers with loyalties closer to Bush's wishes than realities dictate.

The Iraq war cannot be divorced from the American policy toward Pakistan. In order to push for the distraction to the West, the administration needed to portray Afghanistan as under control, and a significant part of that policy was misguided reliance on the efforts of Pakistan and the ISI. Having forced the Taliban and al Qaeda to seek refuge in Pakistan, the US talked up the Pakistanis, assuring the world that the Taliban were sure to find the border region less than hospitable. For all intents and purposes, the policy worked, as the public remained largely unobtrusive on the topic for the better part of 5 years.

The ISI has long associated itself with anti-American militants, whom they utilized to advance their shared aims on targets in Afghanistan and India. Now, the ISI is drunk with American funds and free to pursue those long-standing policies with even greater fervor, and the US as usual is surprised to find that not everyone who accepts funding is necessarily as dedicated to orthodoxy as we would like. To that end, the ISI is believed to have played a significant role in last month's bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Aside from using American money to pursue enmity with India, the ISI has been playing both sides of the fence, warning militants in the border region of impending US attacks and "in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas."

Although this reality is sure to place a strain on US-Pakistani relations, there is of course no expectation that the tap will be turned off. Barbs will be traded for a short period, to be sure, but the situation will soon return to normal, with American funds and arms flowing into Pakistan only to find their way back at the point of an RPG. Throwing money at problems, though, is all the US really attempts to solve them. Examining the underlying causes might require a but of introspection, of self-criticism which in American foreign policy is sacrilege. Thus the wheel continues to roll unabated, America throwing out money and then throwing up its hands when it comes back at it, never sure just what to make of it all, never willing to truly investigate the core of international relations.

All the US is left with for its efforts, half-hearted as they were, is a narco-state in no better shape than it was in 2001. The per-capita, post-war investment in Afghanistan pales in comparison to all other such situations, significantly less than that for post-conflict and post-natural-disaster rebuilding in every other part of the world. Left alone to reconstitute in Pakistan, the Taliban has renewed its assault on Kabul, forcing even more investors to flee along with any Afghans of any intellectual import or promise.

Although it has not happened, even had the Taliban been eliminated the situation would scarcely be different. The specific propagator of violence is of less importance than the arena of economic devastation left in the wake of destruction followed by inattention. Until the US learns to fight the root causes of terrorism in addition to its contemporary perpetrators, it is doomed to remain tied to merry-go-round, with little hope of getting off.

Related:

Surge II: Afghanistan, July 15
Afghanistan: Right War or No, It's Still War, July 21

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Afghanistan: Right War or No, It's Still War

In comparison to the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan represents the lesser of two evils in the minds of many. Faced with pulling out of the unpopular Iraq, American leaders and the public are left with a search for a place to send American forces that doesn't include home, and have settled on Afghanistan, painting it as the "right war." On the surface, the phrase seems direct enough. The perpetrators of the WTC attacks reside along its borders, not in oil-rich Iraq. That reality, though, has succeeded in wiping from the national discourse the fact that "right" or not, Americans and Afghanis are still dying in ever-increasing numbers while NATO and American forces achieve absolutely nothing strategically.

Terrorism, like Communism before it, presents the ruling class with an easy target, a blanket phraseology which can easily be transferred from one enemy to the next in order to stoke the militaristic fires that burn just below the surface of any true American patriot. What American leaders then and now have failed to do, however, is to provide any tangible method to deal with the root causes of either. Whether it's mistaking any liberal, nationalist movement in Latin America as the manifestation of a Moscow-directed assault on America or interpreting every attempt to secure profits from natural resources for their home countries as terrorism in the Middle East, the US is quick to paint each as a form of extremism that must be met with force.

Never is it considered that peasants in Guatemala should be more than slaves for American merchants or that Iraqi oil money should help rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure destroyed by the US invasion. To do so would be to broach the unmentionable. Yet even those who oppose the scenario of a dictatorial US presence on the world stage on the face of it have no problem supporting interventions abroad, so long as they're the "right" wars.

It is this framing that has allowed supporters of Obama's foreign policy to look past the reality of what he is calling for in Afghanistan: the maintenance of the status quo ante, consisting of mounting death tolls for Afghani civilians and NATO forces alike, as well as supporting the militaristic goals of the Pakistani government vis-a-vis India, all the while accomplishing nothing of tangible scale.

As I've said before, the issue of Pakistan is not a minor one. What Obama is implicitly suggesting with his pledge for more troops is not that he's sending more troops to Afghanistan, but that he will cease to observe the territorial claims of Pakistan. The only way for NATO and the US to fight the Taliban/al Qaeda stronghold in the region is to launch cross-border attacks into Pakistan, which, far from calming the situation, will only bring more variables into the equation and stoke more nationalist opposition among the Pakistani public, 64 percent of which already view the US as Pakistan's biggest threat.

As Secretary of Defense Gates stated last week, "we cannot kill or capture our way to victory." For all his shiny rhetoric, Obama still embodies the century-old American tradition of carrying a "big stick." If a century of coups and regime change have taught us anything, its that resentment doesn't die with titular heads of state or leaders of individual factions. If there is one thing that Americans excel at on the world stage, it's slow learning.

Obama gets a pass for his opposition to the unpopular Iraq occupation, but also because Americans are still conditioned to think that world is dying for a leader in the US. Afghanis or Pakistanis don't want the US to be a leader any more than Americans want Canadians dictating the facets of a good healthcare system to them. Despite his opposition to the Iraq debacle, Obama still embodies this fallacy, still clings to the cookie-cutter vision Americans hold of the rest of the word, one in which a homogeneous set of principles and traits can simply be superimposed over any population with a good degree of accuracy.

It is precisely the American practice of failing to understand even the basic principles of what populations in lands US citizens can't find on a map desire or need. For most, it's the desire for the US to stop trying to help them. Iraqis are less than enthused about the Americans showing the oil ministry how to funnel oil money westward, Pakistanis seem just fine with the residents of the FATA if polls are any indication, and Afghans would love to be able to attend a wedding without NATO ordinance raining down on them.

The logical conclusion of Obama's Afghanistan policy is centered on Islamabad more than Kabul, which means that it's even more far-reaching than the Bush policy. Even if he hasn't expressed it explicitly, Obama is calling for an end to deferring to Pakistani sovereignty in the FATA region. He is declaring in clear, even if unstated, terms to the Musharraf government that if it doesn't pursue the Taliban, the US has no qualms about stepping in. What he is proposing is more of the same, more "you're either with us or against us." Far from a return to a state of US foreign policy that hasn't existed since the late 19th Century, Obama has declared that US interventionism is alive and well, with a slight toning down in Iraq. (He plans to keep plenty of troops there, which might be an issue if any American journalist cared to inquire.)

Where Obama differs from McCain is in his ability to tie different foreign policy arenas together. Where McCain exhibits a sometimes bumbling failure to grasp the interconnectedness of US policy abroad (the issues page of his website doesn't even have a foreign policy section, just Iraq), Obama is adept at dressing the status quo up in a shinier package. The American voter has thus far been codified, but the rest of the world has always held a more accurate assessment of US foreign policy than Americans themselves.


Related:

Surge II: Afghanistan, July 15
Obama Would Keep Lawless Contractors in Iraq, March 3
Foreign Policy Redux, June 25

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John McCain: Bluster More Important Than Results

As evidenced by the firestorm over General Clark's comments suggesting that military service alone doesn't classify one to be President - seemingly a self-evident truth, but you wouldn't know it from the response - the presumption that McCain's time in the Hanoi Hilton somehow mitigates the fact that he has demonstrated a distinct lack of basic comprehension in the foreign policy arena persists. Like George Bush, McCain substitutes a qualitative, fundamental understanding of the real world for a fantasy world full of bluster and posturing, all the while given a pass by the media and the public.

In a country which sought an actual examination of proposals and results on the campaign trail, this errant nature would be seen for what it is and discarded hastily. But in the world of the low-information voter, Americans are blinded by the uniformed past and ignore the disastrous results of McCain's ideas when acted upon.

McCain constantly demonstrates his dearth of knowledge by conflating al Qaeda with every source of resistance and continually suggesting that Iran's influence is entirely unwanted and consigned only to America's enemies. The reality is well-documented and provides a stark contrast to McCain's rhetoric.

As I said while examining Obama's proposals for Afghanistan, the Surge has become a red herring in the discussion of Iraq, used as a way of directing attention away from the first four years of the war and focusing it on a short period where violence began to return to a point still obscene and still of US origin. By pointing to the Surge, McCain and his allies have effectively eliminated any and all discussion of the initial tragedy of the decision to invade Iraq. Now McCain and the White House are trying to parlay that tactical and PR success into a winning argument concerning Afghanistan.

Only when given the free pass on foreign policy that McCain is because of his previous service could he avoid the obvious question that should follow his recent proposal to send more troops to Afghanistan: Where have you been? While everyone else has been screaming from the mountaintops that the situation is swiftly deteriorating, McCain has remained silent, merely repeating his call to stay in Iraq until victory arrived. And because he never defined what that meant, he was able to declare just that on Thursday.

I repeat my statement that we have succeeded in Iraq. Not we are succeeding. We have succeeded in Iraq.

This of course allows him to justify paying a little bit of attention to Afghanistan, as everyone has been pleading for months while he fiddled. But McCain's hands are far from clean on the narco state. When it was suggested in 2003 that Iraq might present a distraction - which it clearly has - McCain simply said that the US could "muddle through Afghanistan." Well, the returns are in on that "muddling," and they aren't pretty. Again, in a reality-based world, this blatant lack of foresight, in tandem with his marginalization of those who were actually correct in their assessment, would be met with real consequences. But McCain bears the scarlet 'R,' so that possibility is out.

McCain is allowed to keep perpetrating his shtick, saying he "knows how to win wars," despite all evidence proving precisely the opposite.

Although he chastises Obama for not "having a strategy," McCain offers up a strategy that points yet again to his complete failure to properly assess even the most apparent realities of the foreign policy arena. His strategy calls for an increase in the size of the Afghan military funded by other countries. This plan ignores entirely the fact that other countries have abandoned the Afghanistan effort precisely because of the Iraq War, a war that McCain has championed since the Nineties. He has also called for more NATO troops, again disregarding Robert Gates' trip earlier this year in search of just that which came up empty.

McCain also promised to capture Osama bin Laden, which is odd given his statement in 2002 on Face the Nation that bin Laden's capture wasn't "that important."

To suggest that McCain's foreign policy proposals should be examined on their merits rather than his past sporting of a uniform is not a denigration of service in general. It is a rational approach to campaign procedure which implies that the results of one's ideas should have at least some bearing on one's reputation. If that were the case, McCain's reputation in the foreign arena would be irreparably damaged, as he has shown with tremendous clarity at every juncture of the Bush years to be completely void of even a fundamental understanding of the real world. In a world governed by results rather than bluster, the fact that those who disagreed with McCain have be proven right at nearly every turn would begin to wear on the man's political stature.

But as it stands, facts have taken a back seat to conventional wisdom. It doesn't matter how many times McCain's policies prove to be an utter failure, he'll still have an 'R' next to his name, and in America that means never having to admit errors, even as they continuously knock you between the eyes.


Related:

Surge II: Afghanistan, July 15
Calling Their Shots, March 20
Changing the Rules of the Game, April 1
Fences Make Good Neighbors, April 11

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Surge II: Afghanistan

The Surge in Iraq was successful in two respects. First, it did coincide, coincidental or causal I'm not sure, with a drop in violence in Iraq. Second, it injected new life into proponents of the war, who by now have very little to stand on in the way of rational thought. By throwing out the red herring of the Surge, the administration was able to point to its moderate successes as a way of directing attention away from the vast array of failures of its Iraq adventure, failures which persist regardless of the attention paid to them.

Where the Surge failed, however, was in accomplishing its stated goal. The tempering of violence was meant as a vehicle for achieving its true aim, which was stabilization of the government. From the American perspective, this meant allowing Maliki the time to push the undesirable political factions out so that democratic principles could not be applied to them in the upcoming (maybe) provincial elections. While the Surge did witness the return of Sunni politicians to Parliament, Iraq is no closer to ceasing to be a "collection of different fiefdoms controlled by warlords," thus signaling the Surge failed in achieving its central goal.

Luckily for the Bush administration, no one is paying attention to the political front, including the Messiah himself, who this weekend wiped his website clear of criticism of the Surge. Apparently, after 100s of thousands of Iraqis have met their demise, a slower pace over several months and all will be forgiven. Downturn in violence or not, those Iraqis remain deceased and the country's infrastructure remains ashambles, well after the taxpayers granted engineering firms billions to fix it. Pointing to the minor success of the Surge is to disregard all the miserable failures that came before, and to grant the term 'success' to simply a slower pace of devastation seems a misuse of the term.

Both Presidential candidates are so enamored with the blinding PR victory that they're calling for a reprise in Afghanistan, which for anyone paying attention has regressed to the point it was circa October 2001. To Obama's credit, he has continuously pointed to Afghanistan as "the real front in the War on Terror," so his call for 10,000 more troops comes as a natural offshoot of his campaign.

McCain, however, made today his first acceptance of that point, his first attempt to perhaps admit that Iraq never was about terrorism and was always an economic endeavor. This change of direction of course comes only after the administration signaled it was okay by insinuating it may do the same last week.

But spoiling the self-congratulatory party are some pesky facts, differences between the two situations. If the most abject failure of American foreign policy is to apply cookie-cutter policies to the world as if its inhabitants were a homogeneous sample and transposable over any region, both McCain and Obama exhibit similar failures in attempting to apply the same tactics used in Iraq to Afghanistan.

The most glaring difficulty is that the Taliban stronghold they seek to root out is not in Afghanistan, but Pakistan. Thus, regardless of the number of troops stationed in Afghanistan, whether increased by 10 or 50 thousand, the same issue of Pakistani sovereignty exists. The Pakistani government has shown no willingness to allow NATO forces to conduct cross-border raids, so any suggestion that the Surge forces would do so would come as an affront to the wishes of our 'ally.'

Musharraf's hold on power grows weaker by the day, which has led to the Pakistanis remaining lax on raids in the FATA and NWP in order to avoid stoking a fire which might drive him from the seat of government. Allowing NATO to conduct itself in Pakistan with autonomy would surely be unpopular among the populace and put Musharraf in greater peril.

The other wrench thrown into the rhetorical cog is the ISI, Pakistan's Intelligence force. Karzai's government is convinced that the ISI is interfering in his country, and responsible for the attempts on his life as well as several bombings, including the recent bombing of the Indian embassy. In other words, Pakistan is engaging in everything Iran is chastised for in Iraq. These are no small obstacles for McCain or Obama.

Unless the two are willing to address the tangible differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, any suggestions involving a Surge in Afghanistan should be regarded as mere rhetorical flair. Neither has illustrated any effort to address Pakistan's role in the deteriorating situation, and until such time as they do, the Surge is a promise without hope for fulfillment.

Related:

Pakistan Stops Fighting Militants, May 18
Nir Rosen: Iraq a Collection of Fiefdoms, April 5
GAO: US Lacks a Plan in Afghanistan, April 20

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US Military Awards Contract to Saudi Fugitive

When not paying mercenaries to fight alongside US forces, the US military is awarding contracts to a Saudi wanted by the US Justice Department.

The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

In relation to the $1.7 billion he's already bilked from tax payers, I suppose that $80 million is a pittance. But, surely there are ways to find jet fuel that don't include paying a man that your own Justice Department has indicted.

Interestingly, Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush's first business venture, Arbusto Energy.

I'm not sure 'interestingly' is the best adverb here. Granting Cheney's old company a no-bid contract to do everything in the conduction of the Iraqi occupation--despite its hand in electrocuting soldiers to death--is perhaps in bad taste, but to take political payback to the point of paying a fugitive might be going a bit far.

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More Bad News on the Real Terror Front

The New York Times is reporting that the Pakistani government has grown weary of the United States' bungling of the war in Afghanistan and has scaled back attempts to help prevent cross-border raids from the FATA region.

Pakistani officials are making it increasingly clear that they have no interest in stopping cross-border attacks by militants into Afghanistan, prompting a new level of frustration from Americans who see the infiltration as a crucial strategic priority in the war in Afghanistan.

This comes after a March visit with Pakistani officials by Admiral Eric Olsen in which he was told that the US was not welcome to conduct cross-border raids of its own. Concurrently, the new leaders of Pakistan have called off raids of their own in a renewed effort to negotiate with militants in the tribal areas.

Pakistani officials aren't pulling any punches:

“Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side,” said Owari Ghani, the governor of North-West Frontier Province, who is also President Pervez Musharraf’s representative in charge of the neighboring tribal areas.

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

“Pakistan is a sovereign state,” he said. “NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

As to the proposed peace accord, the Americans are unlikely to greet it kindly. Aside from halting Pakistani efforts to eliminate militants, it also makes no mention of stopping forays into Afghanistan by the rebels.

The situation is basically thus: The US is being discouraged from launching its own raids, the Pakistanis have grown tired of doing NATO's job, and any peace deal undertaken will not stipulate that cross-border attacks on NATO troops be halted.

While the US military is concentrated in Iraq perpetuating a local war, it has abandoned Afghanistan and allowed a global conflict to fester in its eastern ranges: "The Americans specifically mentioned their concern that Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas were preparing an attack on the United States, [Afrasiab Khattak] said."

Far from making America safer, the Iraq war has allowed danger to reconstitute and simmer unmolested while simultaneously paving the way for an Iranian-led Shite swath across the Middle East.

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On Diversion

Two weeks ago, the GAO released a report detailing the ability of al Qaeda to reconstitute in the tribal areas of Pakistan (FATA region) and the failure of the government to prevent regression in the War on Terror.

Today, it was the State Department's turn, releasing its annual terrorism assessment. As usual, Iran is declared the largest state sponsor of terrorism. Warren Strobel, writing for McClatchy, discusses the report's application to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border:

Terror attacks in Pakistan doubled last year, and casualties from terrorism quadrupled, as extremists reasserted their hold in tribal areas and attempted to extend their reach deep into the country, the State Department said in its annual report Wednesday.

There was also a 16 percent increase in terrorist attacks in neighboring Afghanistan in 2007, the report on global terrorism trends said.

It said that al Qaida has proved "adaptable and resilient" and used a cease-fire agreement along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier to reconstitute its capabilities.

Taken together, the findings appear to confirm that the struggle against terrorism in the troubled Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, which many specialists consider the central battleground in the fight against al Qaida and its affiliates, was set back last year.

While the report seems loathe to mention the Iraqi occupation and its concomitant diversion of resources, it does speak to our reliance on the Pakistani government to police the tribal regions on its western border with Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have long criticized the deal struck in September 2006 between Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and militants in the North Waziristan tribal agency.

Under the agreement, which collapsed last year, the Pakistani military stopped attacks on the militants, and the militants were supposed to evict foreign jihadists and stop cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan.

Senior U.S. officials say that the deal in fact allowed al Qaida and the Taliban to reconstitute and led to an increase in attacks against U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The newly-elected leaders of Pakistan of course suggest that their approach will be more effective, but it remains fact that our past reliance on the Musharraf-led government to deal effectively with the region was misguided at the least. Combined with a diversion of both attention and resources to Iraq, the ineffectiveness of Pakistan has worsened the situation and created a safe haven from which al Qaeda has reconstituted and is free to launch attacks into Afghanistan virtually unmolested.

In addition, al Qaeda has continued its expansion by "making greater use of regional groups, particularly the Algeria-based al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which once focused its attacks exclusively on the Algerian government."

The State Department's report shows in yet more light that the US policy towards terrorism, despite all of its rhetorical flourish, has done nothing to codify the nexus of terror that spawned the World Trade Center attacks, which were the impetus for the counter-terrorism effort in the first place.

To say that the occupation of Iraq has decimated our ability to root out the terrorist stockpiles from whence the attacks came is no longer an opinion or a show of partisanship. It is a statement of fact, borne out again and again by the government's own reports.

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Talking Points Lost

November's election is sure to revive the old adage that Republicans are strong on national security while Democrats lack the resolve to confront foreign threats. This narrative is based mainly on the premise that the best thing one can do to protect the country is to beat one's chest and illustrate strength and fortitude. Where that show of force is directed is not important, merely that it exists.

Thus, the diversion of resources to the debacle in Iraq is seen by those who wish to see it continue indefinitely--or at least until the United States achieves a victory that has yet to be clearly defined--as a signal to terrorists that the US means business. A sign that America is not a country to be messed with, that she is firm in her resolve and holds steadfastly to a principled defense of its right to exist. Everywhere.

That holding such a fallacious contention is demonstrably false and its tenets and presuppositions continuously shattered by the facts and realities of its real-world application is of little concern to the Bush administration, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, or Lindsey Graham. Foreign policy in their myopic worldview is that of the lunchroom or playground. If someone smudges your Pumas, you must show them you aren't afraid, regardless of the actual severity of the offense.

But, again and again, in a waterfall of revelations and realizations of an objective analysis of reality, this school of thought is picked apart piece by piece until all that is left is a small gaggle of fanatics desperately clinging to the shattered remains of a foreign policy so thoroughly debunked it is verging on comical.

This GAO report is but the latest in the school of piranhas nibbling away at the cause of the Iraqi occupation.

The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas

No comprehensive plan for meeting U.S. national security goals in the FATA has been developed, as stipulated by the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (2003), called for by an independent commission (2004), and mandated by congressional legislation (2007).

Not only has the US not developed a workable strategy for the FATA region in Pakistan, but it has failed to do so in defiance of five years of stipulations that it must. The 9/11 Commission Recommendation Act, signed on August 3, 2007 states explicitly:

(1) REQUIREMENT FOR REPORT ON STRATEGY. Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report, in classified form if necessary, that describes the long-term strategy of the United States to engage with the Government of Pakistan to address the issues described in subparagraphs (A) through (F) of subsection (a)(2) and carry out the policies described in subsection (b) in order accomplish the goal of building a moderate, democratic Pakistan.

Like reports illustrating the lack of an al Qaeda/Saddam link or the reality of Iran's ties to the Maliki government before it, the GAO's assertion that the Iraqi Occupation has diverted resources away from the true center of al Qaeda's influence illustrates quite clearly that opponents of the war--Republicans and Democrats alike--are not merely terrorist apologists or lax on defense. Rather, they overwhelmingly see the most pressing need for American national security interests where it really lies, in the FATA lands of western Pakistan, and not where a dwindling number of Iraq War true believers caustically and unconvincingly try to insist.

The USA Today:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Terrorists are still operating freely in Pakistan along the country's Afghanistan border, despite the U.S. giving Pakistan more than $10.5 billion in military and economic aid, according to a government watchdog agency.

The Government Accountability Office says in a report released Thursday that the U.S. lacks a comprehensive plan to deal with the terrorist threat.

[...]

Pakistan is widely seen as the linchpin in the U.S. anti-terrorism strategy. After the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters retreated across the mountainous 373-mile border into Pakistan's unpoliced tribal areas.

Last month, CIA Director Michael Hayden said that if there were another terrorist attack against Americans, it would almost certainly originate from that region, where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

To lump every opponent of the Iraqi Opposition in Iraq into the arena of Code Pink and other pacifist groups is to falsely undermine the validity of the reasoning behind the opposition.

Like the GAO, Democrats or Republican critics of the occupation of Iraq aren't simply speaking out against perceived American interests. They are pleading with the Bush administration or a potential McCain administration to look under the right rock in order to protect those interests.

To say the US has to 'fight them over there so [it] doesn't have to fight them over here' doesn't synch with the policy it's purporting to defend. If a fight 'over there' is what the US is after, it must ascertain an accurate picture of 'over there.' Every day it becomes increasingly clear, to the point that it is now blaringly obvious, that 'over there' is the tribal lands of western Pakistan, not the Shiite slums of Sadr city.

Defense, State, U.S. embassy, and Pakistani government officials recognize that relying primarily on the Pakistani military has not succeeded in neutralizing al Qaeda and preventing the establishment of a safe haven in the FATA. State’s April 2007 Country Reports on Terrorism states that, despite having Pakistani troops in the FATA and sustaining hundreds of casualties, the government of Pakistan has been unable to exert control over the area. The report concluded that Pakistan has now recognized that military operations alone will not restore security and stability to the FATA. Similarly, U.S. embassy officials in Pakistan stated that Taliban and al Qaeda elements have created a safe haven in the FATA and have used it to plan and launch attacks on Afghan, Pakistani, U.S., and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The embassy further noted that al Qaeda and the Taliban continue to recruit, train, and operate in the FATA.

Also:

al Qaeda is now using the Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place, including the identification, training, and positioning of Western operatives for an attack. It stated that al Qaeda is most likely using the FATA to plot terrorist attacks against political, economic, and infrastructure targets in America "designed to produce mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the population.

It is long past time to change the framework of this debate. Portraying opponents of US policy vis-a-vis Iraq as opponents of American self-interest is fallacious and intellectually dishonest. It has become blindingly clear that these dissenters are begging for someone, anyone, in the Bush administration to notice where those security interests lie. Like so many others, they are dismissed out of hand, only to be proven right down the road.

For six years, opponents of Bush's policy in Iraq have been proven overwhelmingly correct in their assertions with the passage of time. Whether it concerned weapons of mass destruction, the response of the Iraqi population or the lack of preparedness for extended occupation, critics of the war have been vindicated time and again. But this vindication comes much too late.

There is still time, though. There is time for the Bush administration to cease waiting to be proven wrong. There is time to change paths, time to own up to the realities of the world as it is and not as they wish it were. But time is running out. For when the vindication of the GAO's findings comes, it may not be in a form that lends the US many options.

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