What Are They Smoking at the Toronto Star?

That was my initial reaction when I read Murray Brewster’s piece on Afghanistan, “Taliban Jack” No Longer Alone.

After effusively praising Jack Layton for introducing the entire planet to the idea of negotiating with the Taliban even though both the Brits and Karzai were parlaying with the insurgency before Jack ever breathed a word of it, Brewster went on to make some remarkable claims about the mission.

He talked about a “battlefield strategy” that is “part of an evolving counter-insurgency doctrine” by Western military leaders in Afghanistan. Strategy? That’s rich. And it’s heartwarming to realize that we actually have a “counter-insurgency doctrine” where none has been evident before. Is everyone rushing off for talks with the Taliban a counter-insurgency doctrine? Well, there’s nothing else so I guess, to Mr. Brewster, that must be it.

The scary thing is what if Brewster’s right? What if this is our battlefield strategy, our counter-insurgency doctrine? Oh dear.

 

May I Have Your Autograph, Please, Mr. Taliban?

The next thing you know they’ll be on The View or maybe even Oprah.

Pakistan is talking to them, so is Afghanistan. The Saudis are always up for a chat with them. The Brits have exchanged pleasantries. Canada thinks it’s not a bad idea that someone talks with them and now even the Americans are toying with the idea of having them over for tea.

The Terrors of the Khyber Pass are the most popular bunch in town these days. Everybody wants to make nice. But wait, these are the insurgents, the bad guys, the widowmakers of Kandahar. Aren’t we supposed to be talking to them across open sights?

Welcome to the era of “if you can’t beat’em, try something, anything else.” Everybody is trying to find some deal sweet enough that even an Islamist fundamentalist can’t refuse.

Imagine what it must be like to be a Taliban leader these days. You have to decide which invitations you’re going to accept (presumably the ones with the best swag), what to wear, what hat goes with which shoes – these are tough things for a jihadi mountain man.

Now the trick is to always negotiate from a position of strength. Oh, that might be a problem for our side. You can’t find an American or NATO general these days willing to say we can beat them. They used to say that – a lot – they said it for years – and years – but no more, sigh. Now that they’ve decided it’s better for their careers to change course, it’s no longer just a military problem, no, no, no. Now it’s a political problem. In fact you just might notice that, when it comes to sitting down with these guys, there’s not a general to be seen from our side. No, that would be rude.

So, if you’re going to sell a deal, you have to have a deal to sell. We know they’re not bringing any deals to us. We’re the offeror, they’re the offeree. What have we got that they want? What do they want? What do they have that we want?

It’s obvious that we’d be happy if they stopped blowing up our convoys and shooting at people. We want them to “stop.” To make sure they don’t start again, we’d like them to integrate into the political structure of Afghanistan and of Pakistan. It would help no end if there was a viable political structure in either Afghanistan or Pakistan but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I mean, let’s be realistic. What would you pay for a piece of the action at Hamid Karzai’s table? Probably even less than it’s worth and that’s hard to do when it’s worthless.

Reality sets in. We know we’re not going to land any sweetheart deals with the Taliban so we’ll leave that futile chinwag up to the Afghan, Pakistani and Saudi governments. What we want is to focus on the supposedly less-extreme parts of the Taliban, persuade them to defect. We’ll set them up on Easy Street and that will lure even more to come over. This way we’ll hollow out the insurgency.

It sounds like a plan – a very, very bad plan. To begin with, you never, ever let the other side know they’ve got the upper hand. You don’t let on that they’re winning. Well, that horse is already out of the barn. If we can’t control the insurgency – and we can’t – we can’t protect defectors, or their families, from retribution. The Taliban doesn’t get its support from playing nice, we know that. Given that the insurgents have already infiltrated the government and the police and the army, where’s a defector to hide?

“Too many cooks.” The Saudis and Afghans and Pakistanis are talking with the Taliban Head Office boys. If we Infidels start messing about with the Branch Office types, how well do you think that’s going to go down with the Taliban board of directors?

The Talibs have always said they would negotiate but only after US and NATO forces leave. Do we have some reason to believe they’re bluffing, that they’ll settle for less? If we don’t, we’re in an “A” or “B” situation and if we can’t break that, we’ll eventually have to accept it. We’ve pretty much known that all along. That’s the whole idea about establishing a strong, central government supported by a well-trained, well-equipped army. Now, if we were succeeding on the government thing and the army thing, we wouldn’t be talking about negotiations, would we? Of course not. We’d have them sew on their brigade patches, hand them the keys to the armoury and di di mau right out of there. Oops, sorry for the Vietnam reference.

No, my take on all these negotiations is that they’re a tacit admission of defeat, even fear. We haven’t done what we said we’d do when we went in there seven years ago. We haven’t even held the line. We haven’t succeeded on a single front over there, not one. Now we’re in a dilemma. The Taliban are not only resurgent in Afghanistan, able to operate pretty much as they chose wherever they chose, but they’re also destabilizing our key ally next door, Pakistan. And we don’t have anything in our fabulous, state-of-the-art bag of tricks to make it go away.

What would success from these negotiations look like? I figure if we could somehow get the Taliban to sever ties with al-Qaeda, that would be victory beyond what we deserve. We’ve spent the last seven years driving them into the arms of al-Qaeda so undoing what we’ve wrought would be a Herculean task. Still, al-Qaeda is an Arab outfit. It’s not Pashtun or Hazara or Uzbek or Tajik or Turkmen or Kurd or any of the other ethnic players in the region. They’re foreigners in a land that doesn’t particularly like foreigners. That may be enough to tip the scales.

Getting out of Afghanistan isn’t going to be pretty, no matter how these talks turn out.

 

The Only Way Out of Afghanistan

Is a national army viable in a country that is riven with tribalism?

Rivalries are endemic in tribalism. Afghanistan has five main tribes – the Pashtun (including Balochs), Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen and Hazara along with a smattering of Kurds and a few others. They represent a diverse patchwork of ethnicities – Persian, Oriental, South Asian – vestiges of centuries of war and conquest. The tribes, in turn, are organized around the authority of warlords who, during the Soviet and Taliban eras, operated some pretty powerful militias. These are people and leaders steeped in civil strife and armed conflict.

How can a national army be any more viable than the national government it serves? History shows it can’t and history also shows that, in the absence of a viable national government, some militaries have stepped into that power vacuum to take control themselves. South Vietnam, Pakistan, Central and South America, the list goes on.

In Afghanistan, we’re counting on the creation of a sufficiently large, adequately trained, effective Afghan National Army as our way out of that place. That is our only exit strategy.

So just how is the ANA doing seven years after the Taliban was sent packing? NATO commanders say when they get the Afghan army in the field, they’re not bad at all. Beyond that, we don’t hear much about the ANA.

In the early years, the Afghan National Army was plagued with high desertion rates. No one knows what the desertion situation is now because that information is no longer given out. A story in yesterday’s Toronto Star pointed out that the Taliban are now using bribery to fuel desertion and undermine the Afghan army. “…U.S. and Canadian mentors complain privately about the slovenly appearance and lack of discipline among soldiers in the Afghan army. There are also complaints about petty theft, mistreatment and infiltration of the army by Taliban spies.”

An immediate concern is the state of the central government in Kabul. Despite the assistance provided by NATO and the US military, Hamid Karzai has been a dismal failure at extending the government’s control much beyond the capital. That creates power vacuums throughout the countryside that, as expected, are being filled by various ne’er-do-wells. Forget the Taliban, how is the central government going to dislodge these other rivals?

Even the wardrum-beating National Post has finally caught on to the state of affairs in Kandahar. Yesterday the paper reported that the Taliban have established a parallel government that operates pretty much throughout Kandahar as they please.

It’s always been my view that nothing we did in Afghanistan could make any real difference unless and until there was a viable central government in Kabul. A country needs a backbone and, in this case, it’s struggling without one. Training an army is a great idea – if it has an effective government to serve. What if it doesn’t? With the insurgency growing and new groups joining in with the Taliban, I don’t think we’re going to have to wait too long to see how long the Afghan army can function in a political vacuum.

 

Pakistan Takes Refuge Under Chinese Wing

Pakistan continues to drift further away from the West and closer to China. When Pakistan plays such an integral role in the war which we’re supposed to be fighting next door in Afghanistan, that’s hardly welcome news.

The Pakistan news agency, Dawn, gives a pretty good indication of where this is going:

..Islamabad is looking forward to bolstering ties with Beijing in a big way.

The president’s decision to visit Beijing after every three months and agreements for the setting up of two nuclear energy plants, launch of a satellite and heavy investments by Chinese corporations in several other projects are some of the signs.

According to the foreign minister, the president would visit China every three months for “promoting economic integration between the two countries, enhancing their connectivity, optimally utilising the economic complementarities; and promoting trans-regional economic cooperation”.

“President Zardari wants to give a new dimension to China-Pakistan relations, basing them on enhanced economic cooperation,” the foreign minister said.

In the energy sector, Mr Qureshi also saw a role for China in the gas pipeline project between Iran and Pakistan. “I see a role for China whether China joins the projects at some later stage or invests in it.”

Another Pakistani news service, PakTribune, has this from Zardari:

The President pointed out that Pakistan has been following China’s progress and “we take pride in their success, because we are like a family.”

“Chinese and Pakistani people are like a family”, he said. “We see their progress with pride and are happy to see our friends strong. If China is strong, we are strong.”

There has been a groundswell of anti-Americanism building in Pakistan since before the ouster of Pervez Musharraf. The Zardari government seems to be riding that wave with real success. There are real economic, military and security questions that will come out of the closer bonds being forged between Islamabad and Beijing.

 

Open Season on Little Boys’ Bums in Kandahar

For Gung-Ho Steve, the Afghanistan mission was all show, no go and now that it’s lost its lustre and partisan, political advantage, it’s “out of sight, out of mind” for the Cons. To help that along they’ve conveniently gagged the Armed Forces. Harper’s PMO will let you know everything they want you to believe about Afghanistan. Why? Because our media sheep let them get away with it and there’s nobody within their party willing to stand up for Canadians and our soldiers. But I digress.

There’s an awful scandal going on in Afghanistan. It concerns complaints of Canadian soldiers that they’ve had to watch, helpless, as Afghan soldiers and interpreters rape young boys. In June, the Toronto Star reported that several soldiers said they had complained but were ignored by higher ups.

Now the uproar is that the Canadian military’s National Investigation Service has said it could take up to two years to investigate the soldiers’ claims. Two years for them to come back and tell us that – oh my gosh, our side, the good guys, the folks we’re fighting to prop up, really do have a thing for little boys’ bums. Who could’ve known, quelle surprise!

Their dirty little secret is that we’ve known about this and quietly gone along with it literally since we got there.

This is from The New York Times, February 21, 2002: “Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again. “During the Taliban, being with a friend was difficult, but now it is easy again,” said Ahmed Fareed, a 19-year-old man with a white shawl covering his face except for a dark shock of hair and piercing kohl-lined eyes. Mr. Fareed should know. A shopkeeper took him as a lover when he was just 12, he said.

An interest in relationships with young boys among warlords and their militia commanders played a part in the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of the Koran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support. “At that time boys couldn’t come to the market because the commanders would come and take away any that they liked,” said Amin Ullah, a money changer, gesturing to his two teenage sons hunched over wads of afghani bank notes at Kandahar’s currency bazaar.

Yeah, that’s right kids. We ran the Taliban out of town in 2001 and since then it’s been open season on little boys’ bums. But don’t worry, little Afghan girls get their share too. Fathers selling pre-pubescent teen daughters to other old guys is relatively common. They’re not being bought for their culinary skills either. If they don’t go along with sexual slavery their fathers can sling them into prison, indefinitely. Two years ago there were detailed news reports of one such prison where girls as young as 12 were being held, indefinitely, just down the road from the main gate of our base in Kandahar.

You can’t blame the foot soldiers for this. They have to follow orders and procedures. But you can damn well blame those who are giving those orders, dictating those procedures. And you can damn well blame those who are covering this up, because they’re silently condoning pedophilia and, right now, that chain of command goes right to the top. Steve, are you getting this? These animals are ass-raping kids, Steve, on your watch, Steve. So, what are you going to do about it Steve or are you just going to cover it up, pretend not to notice? At this point, Steve, isn’t that condoning pedophilia by omission? You can gag the Armed Forces all you want Steve but this one is on your books and it isn’t going away.

By the way, if you found the language of this post coarse and offensive – good – that’s precisely what I wanted. This is a subject that deserves no less.

 

Pakistan – the Fuze in the Powder Keg

This is a glass half full sort of story, the kind you don’t see on this blog very often. Here’s the premise – maybe a South Asian Cold War wouldn’t be all that bad.

Pakistan is in a shambles. It needs a big power patron to get it through the tough times it’s now in. The US has already gone with India and has now fallen into its own economic abyss. Maybe we’d all be better off if China stepped in.

Just how bad are things in Pakistan today? That’s pretty much answered in today’s Guardian:

…A special session of parliament called by the government to forge a political consensus on the “war on terror” has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and Nato rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.

…Critics of the government, which is led by controversial president Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is “on the edge”. A US official was quoted summing up the assessment as “no money, no energy, no government“.

The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts fear, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively religious curriculum. Inflation is running at 25%, or up to 100% for many staple food items, and unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30% of its value so far this year.

“The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute,” said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister.

“It’s not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred,” he said.

“The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that,” said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition. “At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People’s party.”

Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. “They [the US] are showing a lot more flexibility on their side of the border,” said Khurram Dastagir, a member of parliament for Sharif’s party. “The US are trying to externalise their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us.”

The rising spread of anti-American and anti-NATO anger among the Pakistani people and their leaders is bloody awful for those of us with troops stuck in next door Afghanistan. It seems that the more we push Pakistan, the worse our position becomes.

So, it’s becoming painfully clear that we really can’t deal with Pakistan and we’d be fools to keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we’d all be better off with Pakistan stabilized under Chinese hegemony. At least we know we have some ability to deal with the Chinese.

Don’t get angry about this, it’s our own damned fault. Back in the days of Bush I, we came to treat the end of the Cold War as the end of our problems. We refused to see the obvious, that the decline of Soviet hegemony would actually make the world a more dangerous place, spawning a whole nest of failed and rogue states.

There was an enormous opportunity to create a Marshall Plan for the most critical Third World states to stabilize them politically and economically but it was a window of opportunity that we neglected. If you don’t understand that, look at Afghanistan. There was an enormous opportunity but no one was in the mood to commit the vast resources it would have taken to promote such an initiative, and so we let too much slide and we’re paying for that today.

Maybe a return to Cold War hegemony wouldn’t be entirely bad. For starters, it’s already underway, it’s happening whether we like it or not. Powerful nations inevitably seek to establish spheres of influence in their neighbouring states. We take ours for granted but imagine what Washington would do if it found Russian weaponry deployed along the Rio Grande?

As China borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan it has an inevitable vested interest in the spread of its sphere of influence into these countries. Likewise Russia has a strategic interest in maintaining its sphere of influence in the Cacasus and Eastern Europe. That doesn’t mean subjugation as much as co-operation and doing what’s necessary to achieve stability in these regions.

Maybe it’s time we stopped running around trying to poke rivals in the eye with a sharp stick. It might be time to work with the Chinese to see if they can accomplish in Pakistan what we can’t achieve. That might mean handing over a hunk of geo-political interest but that much seems inevitable in any case so perhaps we ought to see what we can get for it through negotiation first.

 

NOT AGAIN!

More dead Afghans – women and children – taken out by an allied airstrike. The good news – this time it’s only 18, maybe nine more buried under the rubble. From BBC News:

“A BBC reporter in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah saw the bodies – three women and the rest children – ranging in age from six months to 15.
The families brought the bodies from their village in the Nad Ali district, where they say the air strike occurred.

A further nine bodies are said to be trapped under destroyed buildings.
Nato-led forces say they are investigating the incident in an area where the British military are known to operate.”

What is wrong with us? This plays straight into the Taliban’s hands. It’s the perfect way for us to lose the “hearts and minds” struggle of a guerrilla war.

And don’t give me any of that garbage about these deaths being accidental. There’s nothing accidental about them. We know that massive civilian deaths are inevitable when we rely on aerial bombs to make up for our deliberate choice not to field even a fraction of the number of troops this war demands. We know these civilian deaths are the logical consequence of our dependency on airstrikes and so there can be no argument that, in calling in these airstrikes, we are morally and legally intending to cause these deaths.

I wasn’t going to get into this today but I’ve changed my mind. Here’s an enlightening perspective from Seumas Milne in today’s Guardian:

…The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to “talk about a political settlement”, that was “precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this”. The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship.

This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain.

In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July – US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.

…over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of Nato forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement.
But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. “Close air support” bomb attacks called in by ground forces – which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice – are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the occupation forces.

But while 242 US and Nato ground troops have died in the war with the Taliban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and Nato reliance on air attacks minimises their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers.

It is that equation that makes a nonsense of US and British claims that their civilian victims are accidental “collateral damage”, while the Taliban’s use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and classic guerrilla operations from civilian areas are a sign of their moral depravity. In real life, the escalating civilian death toll is not a mistake, but the result of a clear decision to put the lives of occupation troops before civilians; westerners before Afghans.

Dependence on air power is also a reflection of US imperial overstretch and the reluctance of Nato states to put more boots on the ground. But however much the nominal Afghan president Hamid Karzai rails against Nato’s recklessness with Afghan blood, the indiscriminate air war carries on regardless. Given that the US government spent 10 times more on every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill than it does in “condolence payments” to Afghans for the killing of a family member, perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But nor should it be that the occupation’s cruelty is a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban. As Aga Lalai, who lost both grandparents, his wife, father, three brothers and four sisters in a US bombing in Helmand last summer, put it: “So long as there is just one 40-day-old boy remaining alive, Afghans will fight against the people who do this to us.”

There’s nothing left that’s noble in our war in Afghanistan. There is nothing noble in butchering Afghan civilians in order that we can wage “war on the cheap.” It’s no wonder the Taliban are resurgent, no surprise that they’re now closing in on Kabul. We just keep recruiting more and more insurgents with every civilian we slaughter.

But this war isn’t going to end anytime soon. NATO states might just drift away but American forces aren’t leaving. I recently wrote about the Baloch insurrection in southern Pakistan and America’s strategic and energy interests there. That said, there’s no reason at all, none whatsoever, to continue soldiering on in Afghanistan as America’s Foreign Legion either.

 

That Other Little Civil War Next Door – Balochistan

The previous post on Pakistani forces fighting alongside the Taliban reminded me of Pakistan’s own troubling insurgency with the tribesmen of Balochistan, curiously enough called the Balochs (sometimes Baluchs).

The Balochs’ homeland (shown in pink above), like that of the Pashtun, lies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Baloch territory lies south of Waziristan in the region where Pakistan meets the Indian Ocean. Qetta, a Taliban stronghold, lies in the northern part of Balochistan.

Like the Pashtun, the Balochs got divvied up in a two-state deal when the Brits drew the Duran Line to mark the Pakistan/Afghan border.

Pakistan has four major ethnic groups – Punjabi (the military), Sindhi (the economic and political), Pashtun or Pathan and Baloch. Like Afghanistan’s ethnic melange, these players don’t always see eye to eye and at times work at cross purposes. This is one of those moments for the Balochs.

Like other ethnic groups, such as the Kurds, the Balochs would really like the unification of their people (in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran) and the creation of an independent state. The Balochs have been waging insurrections against the Pakistanis almost since Pakistan was created by the Brits in 1947. There have been insurgencies in 1948, 1968, 1973, 1977, 2005, 2006, and right now.

Everybody has an interest in the Baloch region of Pakistan. The US sees it as an excellent staging area in the event of war with Iran. Tehran accuses the Americans of supporting a Baloch insurgency within Iran. And then there’s the dual villains in much of today’s global insecurity – oil and gas.

The region also holds large reserves of natural gas, oil and uranium critical to an energy starved Pakistan. The Balochs complain they’re being exploited by Islamabad and demand greater prosperity from these resources.

Through the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, the Baloch territory offers a corridor for a commercial and energy corridor. Planning is underway for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan and Iran both to the sea and north to China and possibly into India.

Look at the players – Pakistan, the United States, Afghanistan, India, Iran and China. If that mob doesn’t give you a headache, it should.

The energy issue creates what American strategic analysts call an “energy-insurgency nexus.” How Washington perceives that to be in American and Western strategic interests could reshape the geopolitical makeup of the entire region.

Pakistan, alienated by the recent American nuclear deal with India, is already toying with membership in the SCO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran also wants into that defensive alliance. That could bring both countries and the energy facilities of their region under the umbrella of Russia and China.

We’ve seen how determined the US has been to oust Soviet influence in the energy-rich Caucasus region, first Georgia and now Ukraine. Would the Americans be any less determined to deny Chinese influence over South Asian energy resources?

Like everything else in this region, it’s all wheels within wheels. No two players’ interests here are inevitably coterminous. So far the US hasn’t had to take sides between Islamabad and the Balochs yet it may well come down to that. China, meanwhile, operates very quietly in this region. China is already planning to build a rail and highway route into northern Afghanistan where it has acquired the rights to that country’s biggest copper reserves. China may find it worthwhile to try to pry Pakistan out of Washington’s sphere of influence.

I suspect we won’t have much chance of settling the Taliban issue while the Baloch insurgency stands unresolved. It’s hard to conceive of America pulling its military forces out of Afghanistan for many years to come. There’s far too much at stake, geo-politically, within Afghanistan and along its borders (Pakistan, China, Iran) and nowhere else for Washington to maintain a sizeable military presence. It’s entirely unclear whether the Afghan tribes will tolerate a quasi-permanent American military force in their country or whether they will temporarily side with the Taliban as they united with the Pashtun two decades earlier to drive out the Soviets.

 

Pakistani Army Fighting Alongside Taliban

British officials are being accused of covering up the death of a Pakistani army officer killed by British troops last year during a raid on a Taliban strongpoint in Afghanistan’s Sangin valley. When soldiers entered the compound they found an ID card identifying one of the Taliban dead as a Pakistani officer.

The Times of London reports that this was the first concrete proof of Pakistani military participation in the Taliban insurgency. Afghan president Karzai is said to have been furious at the British coverup.

The newspaper quotes an American marine officer as saying that US forces have been in several gunfights with Pakistani forces:

“Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Nash, who commanded an embedded training team in eastern Afghanistan from June 2007 to March this year, told the Army Times that Pakistani forces flew repeated helicopter missions into Afghanistan to resupply a Taliban base camp during a fierce battle in June last year. Nash said: “We were on the receiving end of Pakistani military D-30 [a howitzer]. On numerous occasions Afghan border police checkpoints and observation posts were attacked by Pakistani military forces.”

 

Afghanistan – Only Getting Worse – Top US General

America’s top uniform, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen didn’t pull any punches when he sat down to a breakfast with reporters this morning. He warned them that conditions will likely worsen in Afghanistan next year. Mullen said that the Afghan situation has been headed in the wrong direction for the past two years. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the security situation in Afghanistan cannot improve until there’s economic and political development in Afghanistan and the U.S. and its coalition partners have embraced a strategy that links Afghan and Pakistani issues.
“The trends across the board are not going in the right direction,” Mullen said at a breakfast with reporters this morning. “It will be tougher next year unless we get at all these challenges.”

So, just why did we let things go to hell in a handbasket these past two years? What was that all about? Oh yeah, it’s that “economy of force” thing, a means of describing the American military approach to Afghanistan which translates into committing a minimal number of troops.

General David Petraeus himself has described counterinsurgency warfare, the very type we’re waging in Afghanistan, is the most labour-intensive of all. He’s said that you have to throw huge numbers of troops into it for a long period of time – or you lose. He’s written that you have to tackle this sort of war aggressively and get the job done fast because, if you don’t, you lose the support of the locals and that means you lose the war.

If you read the American military’s new counterinsurgency manual, prepared under the direction of Petraeus himself, you’ll find that it details the “do’s and don’t’s” of counterinsurgency warfare and that, for the past seven years, we’ve been on the wrong side of the do’s and the don’ts. We’ve made every error in the book and yet we still seem puzzled that the Taliban is resurgent?

But wait, there’s more! NATO, already unable to contain the Taliban, has decided to attack the opium trade but – get this – only the operations that support the Taliban.