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Serial Catastrophes in Afghanistan Threaten Obama Policy
You probably won't see it in most US news outlets, but on Monday morning in Kabul and Jalalabad, hundreds of university students demonstrated against US strikes this weekend that allegedly killed a number of civilians. I want to underline the irony that the students in Tehran University are protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while students in these two Afghan cities are calling for Yankees to go home. Nangarhar University in Jalalabad only has a student body of about 3200, so 'hundreds' of students protesting there would be a significant proportion of the student body.
The demonstrations could be a harbinger of things to come, but there was worse news. CIA field officers blown up, four US troops killed Sunday, and the rejection of most of the cabinet nominees by parliament, all signal rocky times ahead.
The past two weeks have seen the situation in Afghanistan deteriorate palpably, raising significant questions about the viability of the Obama-McChrysstal plan for the country. The chain of catastrophes has been reported in piecemeal fashion, but taken together these events are far more ominous than they might appear on the surface.
First, the US military launched a raid in Kunar Province two days after Christmas on a village a night, in which President Hamid Karzai alleged that 10 civilians, some 8 of them schoolchildren, had been killed (some say dragged out of their beds and executed). The NYT reported the head of a Kabul delegation to the village saying,"They gathered eight school students from two compounds and put them in one room and shot them with small arms." (The spokesman is a former governor of Kunar and now a close adviser to President Hamid Karzai-- i.e. not exactly a pro-Taliban source). The charitable theory is that in a nighttime raid, US troops got disoriented and hit the wrong group of young men.
The outraged Afghan public saw this raid as an atrocity, and on Wednesday December 30, they mounted street protests against the US in Jalalabad, an eastern Pashtun city, and Kabul. In Jalalabad, hundreds of university students blocked the main roads, and then marched in the streets, chanting "Death to Obama" and "Death to America," and burning Obama in effigy. (If they go on like that, the anti-imperialist Pashtun college students of Jalalabad may attract the support of Fox Cable News . . .)
Even while the protests were taking place in Jalalabad and Kabul, a NATO missile strike on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province was alleged to have killed as many as 7 more civilians, some of them children. Now the Afghan public was really angry.
Then on Thursday, all hell broke loose when a high-level Pashtun asset who had been informing to the CIA on the location of important al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives detonated a vest bomb at FOB Chapman in Khost province, a CIA forward base. The attacker killed 7 field officers and one Jordanian intelligence operative detailed to the base. Those experience field officers were on the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda and their loss is a big blow to counter-terrorism. It is true that they had been drawn in to a campaign of assassination, but it is the president who gave them that task--unwisely, in my view.
The use of a double agent not only to misinform but actually to kill the most experienced counter-terrorism officers in the region showed the sophistication of tactical thinking in the Afghan insurgency.
The CIA's dependence on a double agent who finally openly betrayed them raises troubling questions about US strategy and tactics in the region. Such informants essentially direct CIA drone missile strikes.
You could imagine Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani Network in Khost and over the border in Pakistan's North Waziristan, inserting such a double agent into FOB Chapman and then using the CIA. For instance, what if a middling member of the Haqqani network launched a challenge to Siraj's leadership and that of his ailing father, Jalaluddin (an old-time ally of Reagan who was warmly greeted in the White House in the 1980s)? Wouldn't it be easy enough just to have the double agent tell the CIA that the challenger is a really bad guy in cahoots with al-Qaeda? Boom. Drone strike kills Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. In this way, Siraj could have used the US to eliminate rivals and become more and more powerful. And how many double agents have given up a few Arab jihadis who had fallen out with the Haqqanis, but then deliberately followed this up with bad intel on some innocent village, making the name of the US mud among the Pashtuns.
The drone strikes shouldn't be run by the CIA, and probably shouldn't be run at all. It could well be that savvy old-time Mujahidin trained in CIA tradecraft in the 1980s are having our young wet behind the ears field officers for lunch.
In short, is the bombing at FOB Chapman the tip of an iceberg of misinformation, on which the Titanic of Obama's AfPak policy could well founder?
Aljazeera English has video of these dramatic events leading up to the New Year, including the anti-US demonstrations, which looked big and significant to me on satellite television.
A soldier of the Afghan army shot an American soldier, further raising suspicions between the two supposed partners. Then a Canadian unit and embedded journalist were blown up.
There were more errant US strikes over the weekend, producing the demonstrations in Kabul and Jalalabad on Monday morning.
Then there were two other pieces of information coming out in the past few days that suggest all is not well.
First, a report on the Afghanistan Army threw cold water all over the idea that it could be enlarged and trained to provide security in the country any time soon. High desertion rates, illiteracy, working half days, refusal to stand and fight against the enemy, and other factors just made that prospect remote. But such training, and the substitution of the Afghan National Army for NATO and US forces is the centerpiece of the Obama-McChrystal plan.
Finally, the Afghan parliament rejected 17 of the 24 nominees to the cabinet offered by President Karzai. The speaker of the House, Yunus Qanuni, supported Karzai's rival, Abdullah Abdullah, in August's presidential elections-- which many Afghans believe Karzai stole. This rejection was the Abdullah faction's chance to humiliate Karzai in revenge.
Aljazeera English has video on the rejection of 70 percent of the cabinet, including the old time warlord of Herat, Ismail Khan, and a key women's affairs minister.
But the step means that we go into the winter with 17 ministries headless. Having an increasingly competent Afghan government to partner with was another key element of the Obama plan. There is not one.
So, the US is killing schoolchildren far too often, enraging the Afghan public. It has provoked a studnet protest movement against it in Jalalabad and Kabul. Its informants are double agents. Its supposed partner, the Afghan army, mostly doesn't actually exist and couldn't be depended on to show up to anything important; and that is when they aren't taking potshots at US troops; and there is no Afghan government as we go into 2010.
President Obama may have a lot on his plate, but Afghanistan could make or break his presidency. If he doesn't view what has happened there while he was in Hawaii with alarm and begin thinking of alternative strategies, he could be in big trouble.
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16 Comments so far
Show AllGetoutaboutit!
"So, the US is killing schoolchildren far too often, enraging the Afghan public."
What, so we should kill them a little less often? Not EVERY day! Once or twice a week, US troops kill a dozen or so schoolchildren, make up lies about it, pretend there'll be an "investigation," and get on with the next atrocity, just as easily forgotten as the millions we've killed over the past who knows how many years, on our long march to freedom and democracy. Who's countin'? But by all means, let's kill a few less schoolkids so the Afghans won't be quite as enraged with us. We'll win those hearts and minds in no time! Obama will succeed in Afghanistan! And I'll build a rocket ship out of plywood and duct tape and fly to Mars next week.
Obama failed to be an individual the moment he took office....he is just a puppet in the hands of the evil puppet-masters!
That is the clearest prediction I have seen so far in print of the laws of psychic physics (Karma) and the Golden Rule. (my translation) Law of Karma predicts The War economy will bring more terrorism and counter terrorism and counter-counter terrorism in the 2010's... but still the toxic pollution of that war economy will kill a thousand times more victims than all deaths counted in the War to find the enemy in the 2010's
The military seeks out enemies and pays someone to steer them in the right direction and then after killing innocent kids with the drones and-joint operations assassination squads, the enemy target informer expert drops in with an explosive belt for the top CIA Captains looking for enemies.
Avatar is supposed to be a movie
Good Luck and Karma
Please, US soldiers are not "troops": "troop" means an undefined but greater than 1 number of soldiers, or baboons or what have you. 4 US SOLDIERS were killed in Afghanistan on Sunday.
This use of the word "troops" smells like some kind of secret hand signal that most of us are supposed to ignore...
Note the level of coverage in mainstream media for demonstrations in Teheran vs. those in Kabul and Jalalabad. The Afghan demonstrations will be minimized.
Joe
"The use of a double agent not only to misinform but actually to kill the most experienced counter-intelligence officers in the region showed the sophistication of tactical thinking in the Afghan insurgency. The CIA's reliance upon a [Pashtun] double agent who finally openly betrayed them raises troubling questions about US strategy and tactics in the region." - Juan Cole
Wow. That is putting it mildly.
Professor Cole is a national resource of enormous value when it comes to stripping away the propaganda spin, deciphering, translating, and following the ebb and flow of Uncle Sam's endless wars upon the alphabet soup of evil doer terrorists of the Muslim world.
Yes, the assassination of the CIA station chief, the head of the CIA's bin Laden/Zwahiri search unit, and other key US intelligence officials in a single bomb blast may north of Kabul may indeed show "sophistication of tactical thinking on the part of the Afghan insurgency".
But then again, my unsophisticated hunch is that the use of a treacherous informant double agent as a suicide bomber to wipe out the CIA's inner circle brain trust in a single, dramatic operation like this may say something far more important about the reach, and the mindset, of the Pakistani ISI......
Only time will tell, so stay tuned.
Bill from Saginaw
On Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, professor Cole has deleted reference to the double agent suicide bomber being a Pashtun, identifying him now instead as a Jordanian informant (consistent with the latest news reporting of this event in the mainstream media).
Regardless, the successful assassination of the CIA's braintrust in the hunt for bin Laden and Zwahiri inside a US military compound in a relatively secure area of northern Afghanistan speaks volumes about the futility of Uncle Sam trying to run a Phoenix Program/Battle of Algiers-patterned counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, where nationalist hostility towards foreign occupation and tribal loyalties trump everything. It is truly Vietnam redux, as far as human intelligence capacity within the local population is concerned.
Much like the Pentagon brass, the Robert Gates black ops faction within the Central Intelligence Agency still is working feverishly and patiently to try to revise the history of what went wrong in Vietnam, and how with just a little more tactical fine tuning, manpower, firepower, and patience America woulda shoulda won. That Barack Obama has now irreparably tied his personal political fortunes - and that of the Democratic Party - to this bloody fools' errand is truly tragic.
I still think the Pakistani ISI has been pulling the strings ever since the spring of 2001.
Bill from Saginaw
"The drone strikes shouldn't be run by the CIA, and probably shouldn't be run at all."
Probably? Aren't these drone attacks illegal under international - hence, US - law? How about the whole thing is utter evil, besides being illegal?
You know, Juan Cole, I had an argument with you about Iraq. You initially thought it was a good idea to invade that country, even though it was illegal - Iraq had done nothing to us. Surely you didn't believe the warmongers WMD lie. Now you say the US "probably" shouldn't be using illegal drones to kill people. Maybe this is an improvement?
rvrwalker: I agree with you. Prof. Cole tends to disagree with the mainstreaming "thinking" just enough to burnish his credentials as an expert.
The charitable theory is that in a nighttime raid, US troops got disoriented and hit the wrong group of young men.
You don't need a theory here, charitable or otherwise. The longer we are in Afghanistan, the more atrocities will be committed by us. Eventually, there will be an Afghan version of My Lai in which many, many hundreds die (if this hasn't happened already). This is one of a number of things that insure our defeat. Eventually, there is either going to be an Afghan version of the Tet Offensive in order to strike a devastating psychological blow against the United States, or the Afghans will simply go on killing American and NATO troops half a dozen at a time for years and years and years, until finally European troops are pulled from the country, leaving the United States there alone. Obama, like George Wanker Bush, will increasingly appear solely before military audiences. His speeches will grow more and more angry and belligerent. Each speech will mean precisely the same thing: how can these wogs, these fuzzy wuzzies defy me, The Great Obama? It's real simple, jerk-off, it's their country. And that's something that neither Obama nor any elite Republican or Democrat will ever understand.
How do our bombs and drones that kill civilians win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people?
I was under the (apparently false) impression that Juan Cole was very knowledgeable AND conscientious.
His concern for Obama's success while innocent people are savagely attacked (under Obama's "leadership") makes Mr. Cole's comments somewhat suspect.
The Project for A New American Century(PNAC),is unravelling at a faster pace these days. The USA needs to open up new Fronts on the War against "Terror". This latest "False Flag" operation on North West 253, is an opportunity to expand hostilities into The Yemen, and then onto Iran. That ought to solve the whole thing.
Juan, I thought serial catastrophes in Afghanistan WERE 0bama's policy.
Seriously, it seems unlikely that they imagine that they can create stability in Afghanistan by blowing up more Pakistani and Yemeni mosques.
And we have to remember that the US has never much wanted stability in Afghanistan anyway: Carter lures the Soviets into a fools' errand; Raygun and George I fund the least stable elements, then abandon the country when the Russians retreat. "Sure, duke it out, friends, and you're welcome for your independence."
Does it not seem more likely that the goal has contingency responses:
1. If the people of Afghanistan lay down arms and accept the Americans as rulers of all that they see (alright, that's Yurtle the Turtle, from memory), then that's acceptable.
2. More likely, they dislike being oppressed, and bring the country into ongoing battle.
Well, that's acceptable, too: at last the pipeline between the gulf oil and "Stan-countries gas does not go through to China or India.
Meanwhile, the MIC is $miling, and the bill is not the taxpayers' tab.
Even on Common Dreams, the charitable theory is that US soldiers executed 'the wrong group of young men'.
The article and accompanying comment thread (not every comment but most so far) say more about the problems inside the US than any single or group of US military 'incidents'. The real occupation is inside the minds of US citizens, particularly the white ones.
The world is in big trouble.