Afghanistan–Where are we and where do we go from here?

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Rex
Colleagues:
The war in Afghanistan is the longest conflict in U.S. history. It is trite to say that we are now “at a crossroads” in our policy in that theater, since we have traversed many such intersections before, and have yet to find the “road to success”.
Two articles below aptly sum up the situation in Afghanistan and our policy options very well and deserve close attention. The first, by (COL/USA-Ret) Joe Collins, is a comprehensive dissection of the American effort to bring peace, stability and governance  to that troubled country, and provides a fair and thorough analysis of the options we have going forward. COL Collins, a close friend, is one of the few remaining supporters of the Administration’s “counter-insurgency, population-centric” policy, but he is very even-handed in his analysis and recommendations. In truth, there is no easy or good answer–all options have serious pitfalls.
While COL Collins looks at three options, they are really variations on what most observers call Option 1–continuing the “COIN” strategy for an indefinite future. Joe does not mention the Biden-favored “counter-terrorism” alternative, nor does he consider what we usually call Option #3–complete and quick withdrawal of our forces.
The second piece, by neo-isolationist Pat Buchanan, goes further than COL Collin’s options, by calling for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and an end to America’s “neo-imperialist” drive to solve so many of the world’s problems. We will be hearing more support for Buchanan’s approach (discussed more subtly by others, such as COL Skip Bacevich), in the coming months–especially from Obama’s disenchanted left wing. Interesting confluence here of the far right and left coming to a theater near you!
Finally, some have asked for more opinion pieces on Afghanistan. Like certain parts of the body, everyone seems to have one, and I have  collected five op-eds for your perusal if you should wish to pursue the topic further (see attachment).
Good weekend reading! Should take your minds (temporarily) off the economy.
– Ty

1.  Armed Forces Journal July/August 2010
The way ahead in Afghanistan
U.S. must be ready to react to changes on the path to peace
BY JOSEPH J. COLLINS

U.S. efforts and prospects in Afghanistan stand at the intersection of five major vectors. These vectors are likely to bring about significant changes after “7/11” — the July 2011 start of what one day might be called “Afghanization.” Change in Afghanistan, however, may not follow a linear pattern. While the U.S. should seek to shape events, it needs to be ready to react to changes that originate from other sources.

U.S. objectives remain our guide and provide the first vector. Two successive presidents have declared that the war in Afghanistan is a vital interest. Long after 9/11, the administration is still rightfully focused on the defeat or degradation of al-Qaida and its associated movements, one of which is the Afghan Taliban. President Obama set the bar high in his West Point speech: “We must deny al-Qaida a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government so they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.”

Confounding those who doubted his will, Obama in the first 14 months of his administration has twice reinforced our Afghanistan contingent of now nearly 100,000 service members. He has also more than doubled the 2008 drone strikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a May visit to Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai also received a promise from the White House for a deeper, long-term strategic relationship that will cement the U.S.-Afghan partnership beyond the sound of the guns. As the Iraq war fades, the “other war” in Afghanistan has become America’s main effort in the war on terrorism. It is impossible for any U.S. president to abandon or disregard such commitments.

Second, the costs of this war in time, blood and treasure have been high. For the U.S., the war has gone on for nearly nine years, longer than U.S. combat troops were in Vietnam. For Afghanistan, this spring marked 32 years of uninterrupted war. A thousand U.S. war dead, 700 fallen allies and tens of thousands of Afghan dead bear silent witness to the high cost of this protracted conflict. The month of June, with more than 100 allied deaths, was the worst month since the war started. Pakistan has suffered more than 30,000 casualties during the war on terrorism. In a recent visit here, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, reminded his U.S. audiences that in 2009 alone, the Pakistani Army suffered 10,000 casualties in its battles against the Pakistani Taliban.

Politically, most of the NATO nations, unaccustomed to war, are wavering. In Europe, their delicate coalition governments are dealing with serious fiscal problems and low public support for fighting in Afghanistan. American pleas for a larger European contribution have fallen on deaf ears, and most European combat contingents may be withdrawn within a year. War weariness among all combatants is likely to be a significant change agent in the next few years.

U.S. war expenditures in fiscal 2010 will likely exceed $80 billion. This enormous cost — on behalf of a country whose legal gross domestic product (GDP) is about a third of that total — comes at a time of high unemployment and rampant deficit spending in the U.S. As one wag told me, we aren’t yet at the bottom of our purse, but we can see it from here. In the midterm, budgetary constraints in the U.S. and Europe will begin to influence how the coalition pursues its objectives in Afghanistan.

Third, the enemy — generally successful from 2005 to 2009 — is beginning to feel the heat of the Obama surge. Pakistan is slowly awakening to the danger of harboring violent extremist groups in its territory. Its soldiers have fought a war in the North West Frontier Province and South Waziristan to make its point. In Afghanistan, major allied offensives in the Pashtun-dominated south and east highlight the coalition’s determination. U.S. Treasury experts on al-Qaida funding are turning their sharp eyes on the Taliban’s financiers. One of the three major elements of the Afghan Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami faction, has entered into direct talks with the Karzai government. A second part of the Taliban, the Haqqani network, with close connections to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and to al-Qaida, has begun exploratory talks using Pakistan as an intermediary. The Taliban is neither down nor out; it is still resilient and motivated, but for the first time, it is feeling serious pressure from both its enemies and its benefactors.

Fourth, Karzai’s government remains weak, corrupt, ineffective, and by far, the Taliban’s best talking point. The government that must win this war — if it is to be won — seems little more capable than it was in 2002. The Afghan government’s police are a hindrance, its bureaucrats inefficient and corrupt, and its ministries ineffective. The narcotics industry may be a third the size of the entire legal economy. The effect of narcotics trafficking on governmental corruption is profound.

The level of governmental corruption was evident in the recent presidential election. Only the withdrawal of Karzai’s most serious competitor, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, enabled the current president to be legitimately called the winner. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry famously told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama in November that Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner.” More recent bickering had U.S. officials publicly embarrassing Karzai by their public statements, while he bitterly denounced the U.S. and NATO for acting as occupiers, once even threatening to join the Taliban. The mid-May Karzai visit to Washington poured oil on these troubled waters, but it is not clear how long the calm seas will prevail. Friction among the U.S. team — the embassy, Special Representative Richard Holbrooke’s group and the military command — is evident and a key factor hobbling U.S. ability to shape the situation in Afghanistan. Indeed, this friction was a key factor in the inappropriate and ill-timed complaints by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff in a Rolling Stone magazine article that brought about his relief from command.

In all, according to the United Nations, despite much economic aid, Afghanistan in economic and social conditions remains one of the bottom 10 countries in the world. There are, however, a few economic bright spots: Legal GDP growth has been robust, and the Karzai government has increased revenue collection by 58 percent in the past year. It has also begun aggressively to license the development of what may amount to $3 trillion worth of mineral wealth.

Finally, the Afghan people are sick of war and tired of the intrusive presence of coalition forces. While civilian deaths and collateral damage involving the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are way down in the past year, growing coalition forces are hard to live with. Fortunately, for the most part, the Afghan people despise the Taliban more than they dislike the government and its coalition partners. In polls, the Taliban rarely poll higher than 10 percent. Most people seem able to remember how repressive and ineffective the Taliban was at ruling their country from 1996 to 2001. With 40 nations helping them today, the Afghan people also remember that the Taliban regime was officially recognized by only three other countries. The vast majority of Pashtuns who live in the most violent areas, however, fear Taliban terror and must sit on the fence for their own security.

Among the catalysts for strategic change in Afghanistan have been a surge of U.S. forces and civilian officials, increases in aid to the Afghans, and the president’s declaration that in July 2011, “our troops will begin to come home.” On that date, the coalition will begin to transition responsibility for security in selected areas to the Afghans. The president and the secretaries of state and defense have stressed that this withdrawal of combat forces will be “conditions based” and supplemented by a new strategic relationship for the long term.

The projected start of “Afghanization” in particular has caused uncertainty among friends and foes alike, but it has also created movement among key actors. As the promised surge progressed, Pakistan stepped up its pressure on the Taliban, and the Afghan president has bravely (and somewhat incredibly) declared that his country will be ready to take charge of its own security in 2014. One element of the Taliban has come forward to talk about reconciliation. Karzai held a late May “peace jirga” in Kabul to build public support for reintegration and reconciliation. In July, he will sponsor an international conference on future foreig

n assistance.

OPTIONS

In December, the U.S. plans to take stock of its progress. It will assess the situation and begin to identify options for the post-July 2011 period. There will likely be three options that will dominate the minds of Holbrooke, Eikenberry and the new Afghanistan commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

First, there will no doubt be some key players who favor continuing with the U.S. plan that is still unfolding. Given the protracted nature of such conflicts, and barring unforeseen surprises, the battlefield situation in December is not likely to be radically different than it is now. Conservatives will prefer to keep up the full-blown counterinsurgency operation for a few more years and move slowly on the transition to Afghan responsibility for security.

This would give the best breathing space needed for building Afghan capacity, but it is expensive and plays into enemy propaganda about the coalition as an occupying force. Moreover, it will entail very high expenditures, with no guarantee of results. If its proponents succeed, it will probably be only for another six to 12 months. Whatever the selected option, one aspect of the current plan that should be maintained is the progress that ISAF has made in protecting the population and showing respect to Afghans on the roads and in their homes.

A second option would be to reduce over a year (July 2011-July 2012) most of the 30,000 soldiers and Marines in the surge combat forces and make security assistance and capacity building — not the provision of combat forces — ISAF’s top priority. Remaining ISAF combat units could further integrate with fielded Afghanistan National Army units. Maximum emphasis would be placed on quality training for soldiers and policemen. To build Afghan military capacity, ISAF commanders would also emphasize the development of Afghan combat enablers, such as logistics, transportation and aviation. In this option, the focal point of allied strategy would be on the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan and not on allied combat forces.

This option would not be cheap, but it could gradually bring down costs and troop levels. Trading U.S. combat units for ANA or integrated formations, however, would result in some short-term security degradation, a real problem if negotiations are ongoing. On the other hand, the integration of ISAF combat units with ANA units could also pay great training dividends in a few years.

There are other challenges that may arise with this option: The Afghan government may resist integration and improvements in unity of command. U.S. and allied trainer/adviser shortages will have to be filled rapidly. This will be difficult. In a similar vein, the training and education of Afghan civil servants will need much more attention and additional trainer/advisers. In order to bring this about, we need also to reinforce support to the national government, its ministries and its local appointees.

The biggest obstacle to success is and will remain the Afghan police, who will be vital to success in defeating the insurgency. Our efforts to improve their training must be increased. Rule of law programs — courts, jails, legal services — must also be increased if this government will ever rival Taliban dispute resolution mechanisms. The Ministry of Interior may well have to be broken up to defeat its endemic corrupt practices and payoffs that go all the way to the top levels of the ministry, according to in-country observers.

For its part, the government of Afghanistan — which ultimately must win its own war — must work harder against corruption and redouble its efforts to develop its own capacity in every field of endeavor. Links between the center and the provinces must be strengthened. Coalition civilian advisers must become the norm in every ministry and throughout their subdivisions. The civilian part of the U.S. surge must clearly be maintained for a few more years.

A third option — compatible with the options noted above, either sequentially or concurrently — is for the Afghan government, with coalition and U.N. support, to move out smartly on reintegration of individuals and reconciliation with parts of or even the entire Afghan Taliban. To do this, Karzai first will have to win over the nearly 60 percent of the Afghan population that is not Pashtun. These groups — Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazarras and others — were treated poorly by the Taliban and today often live in areas outside Taliban influence. They will want peace, but not at a price that threatens their regions or allows the “new” Taliban much latitude.

There should be limits to our flexibility. Reconciliation and reintegration are not for war criminals. The Afghan constitution can not be bargained away, and participants of all stripes must renounce violence, disavow al-Qaida and come home to Afghanistan without arms. One downside here is the potential for simultaneous talking and fighting to take place. This is hard for Westerners to tolerate; authoritarian entities, like the Taliban, often can manipulate talk-fight periods to their advantage. The best way to ensure Taliban sincerity is to keep up constant military pressure on their formations and their command cadres. The more they feel the heat from the coalition and Pakistan, the more likely they will be to embrace reconciliation.

BEST-LAID PLANS

In sterile decision-making exercises, teams might well decide that the clear way ahead here is to go through these options in numerical order, let security call the tune, with reintegration of individual belligerents coincident with option one. This would be followed by Afghanization, with reconciliation beginning only after option two is well underway. Life, however, tends often to defeat linear thinking and our best-laid plans. The coalition is in the same boat today as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was during the Cold War. When asked what his greatest challenges would be, Macmillan replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.”

Reconciliation may end up leading and not following developments on the battlefield. Counterinsurgency successes in Pakistan can change the battlefield dynamics in Afghanistan, and vice versa. Agreements among regional powers can affect military operations. The rapid exploitation of mineral wealth may provide great incentives for some insurgents to come home and improve their economic lot.

There is an understandable reluctance to move into negotiations while the war continues. Few wars, however, end with the unconditional surrender of your enemy on the deck of a battleship or with an evacuation of your diplomats as enemy tanks seize an ally’s capital city. Most irregular and civil wars end in some form of negotiation. The U.S. should not stand in the way of reconciliation with the Taliban. Rather, it should work for the best possible outcome, guided both by its objectives and available means.

The degree of help the coalition gets from Pakistan will be a key variable in any scenario. Indeed, increased Pakistani pressure on the Afghan Taliban could drastically speed up reconciliation. The U.S. must continue to insist that Pakistan take action against U.S. and Afghan enemies resident on its soil. To obtain the assistance of the regional powers, all of those powers must believe that a future Afghanistan will not work against their interests. To that end, an understanding between India and Pakistan on the future of Afghanistan will be critical to long-term stability in Afghanistan. Separate negotiations among regional powers may be as important as any of the above noted options. To facilitate these negotiations, Holbrooke and his team should be given expanded authorities to facilitate regional negotiations with all interested parties, to include India.

If the situation today in Afghanistan were a song, it would be a remake of the 1950s classic “Something’s Gotta Give.” The U.S. and its partners are approaching an inflection point, a major change of direction in this war. It will be important for the U.S. and allied governments to be on the same wavelength on all aspects of its Afghan policy. With an eye on their objectives and available means, they must remain as determined and flexible in their plans for peace as they have been in their prosecution of the war.

COL. JOSEPH J. COLLINS, a retired Army officer, teaches strategy at the National War College. From 2001 to 2004, he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. He is a 30-year Afghanistan watcher, whose publications on the subject date back to 1980. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Defense Department or government.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2010/07/4653525

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2.
The Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, Jul. 09, 2010

Whose war is it, anyway?

BY PAT BUCHANAN
www.creators.com

`This was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” Strictly speaking, Republican Party Chair Michael Steele was way off base when he made this remark at a closed-door meeting of party contributors in Connecticut.

For the war began in 2001 under George W. Bush and was backed by almost all Americans, who cheered the downfall of the Taliban and the rout of al Qaeda from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Yet, Steele was not entirely wrong.

Today, a majority of Americans do not believe the nine-year war in Afghanistan is any longer worth the rising cost in blood and money. And by declaring it a “war of necessity” and tripling U.S. forces there, this president has made it “Obama’s war” every bit as much as LBJ in 1964 and 1965 made Vietnam “Johnson’s War.”

While Steele has spent every waking hour since his words hit the airwaves explaining, and declaring his commitment to victory, of far more interest is the alacrity with which neoconservatives piled on the chairman, demanding his resignation, while senators castigated him for remarks unacceptable for a Republican Party leader.

Behind the swiftness and severity of the attacks on one of their own by Republican pundits and politicians are motives more serious and sinister than exasperation at another gaffe by Michael Steele.

The War Party is conducting this pre-emptive strike on Steele to send a message to dissenters. In the words of Charles Krauthammer’s phrase, it is now a “capital offense” for a Republican leader not to support the Obama troop surge and the Obama-Petraeus policy.

Yet, a majority of Americans oppose the Afghan war. And the point made by Steele about the futility of fighting in Afghanistan has been made by columnists George Will and Tony Blankley, ex-Rep. Joe Scarborough, Ron Paul and antiwar conservatives and moderates.

When exactly did supporting Obama’s war policy become a litmus test for loyal Republicans?

What the War Party is up to here is a naked attempt to impose its orthodoxy, about the threat of “Islamofascism” and the Long War, on the entire GOP, 28 months before a presidential election.

Republicans of all persuasions should recoil at such arrogance.

For whence does it come, if not the same hawks and neocons who beat the drums for a unnecessary war on Iraq that cost 4,000 U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded and $700 billion, while making widows and orphans of half a million Iraqis?

And what was that all about? Invading and occupying a country that never attacked us — to strip it of weapons it did not have.

Certainly, as the last nominee of the Republican Party, Sen. John McCain can claim to be titular leader, as could George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell or John Boehner.

But the Bush-McCain party was repudiated in landslides in 2006 and 2008, giving Democrats the presidency, the House and a veto-proof Senate. And high among the reasons the country turned on the GOP is that, like Harry Truman and LBJ, the Bush-McCain GOP marched us into wars they could not win and could not end.

This campaign to censure and remove Steele is designed to censor debate and stifle dissent on Obama’s war policy, as long as Obama’s war policy closely tracks the agenda of the War Party.

In November, the Republican Party will make gains. But the party will be deluding itself if it assumes this means America wants a return to the interventionist policies that brought us the Iraq and Afghan wars. The country will simply be saying: We reject Obama’s liberalism as emphatically as we rejected Bush neoconservatism.

Most Americans approve of the agreed-upon end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq by August and removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011, just as they support an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, starting a year from now. But to contend that those who want the withdrawals to begin sooner, or those who want them to begin later, are unpatriotic and do not support the troops is itself unpatriotic.

The time for Republicans to decide on what the foreign policy of the party and a new administration should be is in the primaries of 2012. Until then, let every voice be heard, including that of Michael Steele.

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Afghanistan articles July 2010

Posted in Afghanistan, Newsletter | Comments Off

Questions on Israel and Iran and thoughtful responses

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Rex

Colleagues I thought that (COL) Mike Haas developed some excellent questions regarding Iran and the potential for an Israeli strike on Iran, and sent them to (COL/Dr) Dick Hobbs. Dick is the author of “World War IV and Beyond”, a particularly hard hitting treatise on “Islama-fascism” and the threat represented by militant/Jihadist Islam. However, he has been know to be equally hard on Israel and the powerful Israeli lobby. With Mike and Dick’s permission I am sharing these questions and responses with you. Save the date–on October 5 the NSF will welcome the Israeli Consul-General in LA, Mr. Dayan, to our NSF. Ty

Dick

Having read your book World War IV and Beyond (noting in particular the exhaustive research supporting the content), I believe it safe to say your credentials on the subject of Iran-Israel relations are beyond dispute.  And thus after reading the alarming article (theme:  an Israeli attack on Iran is inevitable) you shared with us this morning, I’d like to submit to you (AND TO YOU ONLY) a few questions.  I hope you’ll share your answers with the Forum readership but that’s your call to make.  Just for fun I’ll put them in a TRUE/FALSE format to help pin you down:-)

1.  The Obama Administration is resigned to the prospect of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon capability, quite likely while Obama is still in his first term.  TRUE/FALSE

Assume that is true because there really is very little they can do about it.  The sad truth is that there is really very little that any country can do about it.  The technology is widely known and available and any country that is willing to spend the time and money can build nuclear weapons.  They can be delayed by various means (threats, sanctions, espionage, attacks), but if they are willing to persist, they will.

2.  The U.S. has no credible military option to engage Iran–given its current military commitments elsewhere–thus will strive to the extreme to avoid a confrontation in any situation short of a direct Iranian attack on U.S. interests in the Gulf region. TRUE/FALSE

True.  We can bomb them (Victory through Airpower!!), but, first that is aggression (a violation of international law) and second, unless we can totally remove the regime, it would only delay any program and have the disadvantage of uniting the country (and perhaps the entire Muslim world) behind their “sovereign right” to have nukes.  There are enough crazy war hawks who would support a “surgical” strike on Iran, but it is very doubtful any US government would want to take on the opprobrium of destroying much of the infrastructure of Iran with the enormous civilian casualties it would entail.  We do not have the ground troops to do anything useful in Iran.

3.  The use of conventional weapons (by either the U.S. or Israel) in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a credible option as the damage done would not effectively halt the program for more than the short-term, maybe a couple of years.  TRUE/FALSE

True.  Also true for nuclear weapons unless we destroy the country (see 2).  The Iranians learned from the Israeli attack on Osirak and they have their facilities widely separated (hundreds of miles) and deep underground.  Facilities might be destroyed or damaged, but most of the scientists and technicians would probably survive.

4.  Any attack on Iran by the U.S. and/or Israel would be followed shortly by a full-scale Hezbollah assault on Israel.  TRUE/FALSE

Quite likely true, but that would only be one of many possible responses by Iran.  HezbAllah is present in other places as well, such as Iraq and South America.  There are many American targets – both individuals and installations – worldwide they could hit.  The most critical target is the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran might try to close which would immediately affect the world economy.  US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf would be vulnerable because the Iranians have developed their “swarming tactics” by which their small fast craft can attack our ships.  They have Silkworm missiles secreted in many locations along the Gulf.  US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan would be vulnerable to attacks.  They have told the Arab leaders on the Gulf that if they are attacked, they will strike their oil installations. However, the oil weapon is a two-edged sword for them because they also need to sell their oil.  Rather than attack Arabs, they could call on the entire Muslim world to join them in a Grand Jihad against Israel and the Great Satan.

5.  Israel has the political will for a pre-emptive attack on Iran, even without active U.S. support.  TRUE/FALSE

True, but I would call it the political stupidity rather than political will.  They know that if they attack, the US will be forced to come to their aid.  The US Congress and the media will scream for the US to aid our “ally.

6.  Ahmadinejad’s widely reported threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ was in fact misinterpreted by the media, i.e., what he actually said was that time alone would remove Israel in its current form from the map. [Something akin to Reagan's famous remark that the communism would be consigned 'to the dustbin of history].  TRUE/FALSE

True.

7.  Even in the event of war with Iran, no U.S. president would/could re-establish the military draft.  TRUE/FALSE

Not sure about this one.  If Iran is attacked, I think we will be in a world war and the nation will have to return to a draft.

8.  UN sanctions to date are significantly altering the behavior of Iran’s ruling mullahs.  TRUE/FALSE

False.  Sanctions are a politician’s way of trying to show the public he is doing something about a problem he has no idea of how to resolve.  There are too many diverse players in this game.  The interests of Russia and China do not coincide with ours.  China needs oil and is not making enemies.  Russia is the major oil country and benefits from anything that disrupts the oil flow and raises the price of oil.

9.  The State of Israel in its current political form would likely survive world condemnation for the economic havoc wrought by a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran.  TRUE/FALSE

Probably true.  But if the attack resulted in a very serious weakening of the US, the future of Israel would be dim.  Israel’s future is not good.  If they do not make some serious decisions on Palestine soon, the likelihood of the continuation of the Jewish state will erode quickly.  Demographics will overcome them and force them to choose between being Jewish or being democratic.

10.  A pre-emptive Israeli attack on Iran would send the U.S. economy into a Depression.  TRUE/FALSE

Probably true.  Any attack on Iran will almost absolutely cause a leap in oil prices, which would place severe strain on an already reeling world economy.  The US is not yet out of the current mess and a new blow would likely turn this recession into a depression.

*****

There are some other points to consider.  Iran does not really need nuclear weapons.  They are strictly the trappings of a major power which Iran is and wants to be so recognized by the rest of the world.  They are mainly good for deterrence (against Israel) but of little value for actual war.  They have thoroughly developed their proxy war capability by their years of experience in Lebanon and Iraq and with the Kurds.  They do not envision normal style conventional war; Lebanon taught them that you can defeat a conventional army (Israel) by sophisticated guerrilla warfare.  They developed effective and accurate long and short range missiles, secure communications (fiber optics – no radios that can be monitored), cracked the Israeli codes, evasion by moving in small groups and hiding in the populace (negating reconnaissance by aircraft, drones and satellites), use of car and truck bombs, developed IEDS and later EFPs (explosively formed penetrators that took out Abrams tanks), etc.

Sunni leadership and the Pan Arab movement have failed and Iran sees the opportunity to seize the leadership of the Muslim world.  They have been pragmatic in dealing with Sunnis such as the Kurds in the PKK against Turkey.  Iran is now less theocratic and ideological and more calculating and pragmatic pursuing its foreign policy interests.  This is probably the most important point in that Iran should now be dealt with as another power and should be seen as a player in power politics.

One last point is that much can be accomplished via espionage and special agents.  The Israelis basically killed the Egyptian nuclear and missile program by killing German scientists.  They also killed off many who were working on various programs in Iraq.  Iran has killed off its own internal opponents overseas including Paris.  Probably as much or longer delays could be attained in Iran with similar targeted programs against scientists and technicians and some facilities.  There has evidently been some of this already.  The advantage is deniability and the preclusion of reprisals that overt attacks almost surely would invoke.

Sorry for the long answers, but it is a touchy subject because of the power of the Israel lobby and media in this country and the feeling that Israel is our great “ally” and we must stand beside this small rogue country.  That is why I think Ty should have another NSF session on Iran.

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Save the Date and NSF Website/newsletter Update

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Rex

Colleagues: A Save the Date for what should be an extremely popular program on July 23 (no RSVPs yet!), and an update on our NSF website/newsletter. Ty

SAVE THE DATE

Friday, July 23, the Sienna, 9 am breakfast

STEPHEN FRYE, M.D.

The War on Drugs: A Super-Colossal Failure

How The Legalization of Drugs Will Dramatically Reduce Drug Use, Reduce Crime, Provide an Enormous Economic Boost and Enhance Our National Security Interests

Dr. Frye, author of “We Really Lost This War! Twenty-five Reasons to Legalize Drugs”  was a former professor at the University of Nevada  School of Medicine. A practicing psychiatrist, he received his MD from George Washington University, did a residency at UCSF, and served two years in the Army with the 10th Special Forces. He is an outspoken advocate of drug legalization, which he believes will reduce our prison population, save us billions of dollars that are now going to Mexican cartels and leading to the possible destabilization of the Mexican government, reduce the number of teen gangs, and provide an economic boost to the treasury.

Controversial to be sure, and I am hoping to have a commentator rebut the professor on the program.
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The National Security Forum website is now operational! Please visit it and get caught up on items I sent out that you may have missed—they are all archived here. The site is “nationalsecurityforum.net”. Yes, please note, that is “.net”

The website was developed by Airman Rex Barton under Tony Lockhard’s guidance, and we also now have two bright, young grad students from the Small Business Center at UNR helping improve the site and get our “mailings” into a newsletter format (Chuck McCumber and Ben Tedore).

I recommend visiting the site every few days–that way something that you did not receive by my clumsy AOL account can be accessed.

Have a great 4th!

n  Ty

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The Real Civil-Military Differences Over Afghanistan

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Rex

Tyrus W. Cobb

June 27, 2010

CONSPICUOUS RESTRAINT AND TARGETED ASSASSINATIONS

In the wake of GEN Stanley McChrystal’s (M4) resignation last week, there has been considerable speculation regarding possible changes in the U.S. strategy for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. In particular, some have stated that with his assumption of command in Kabul of NATO/ISAF forces, GEN Dave Petraeus (P4) will revise the current stringent Rules of Engagement (ROEs), adopt more aggressive tactics in the field, and even “stand up to the civilians in the White House” who have allegedly “shackled the military”.

They are dead wrong. The “Counterinsurgency” (COIN) strategy being pursued in Afghanistan has been devised by military professionals and is being implemented as the Defense Department has requested. In fact, if there is a civilian-military split over the conduct of the war, it is that some highly-placed civilian officials would favor less of an emphasis on “winning the hearts and minds” of the populace and more reliance on a “counter-terrorism” strategy; i.e., less concern with nation-building but a focus on striking hard and deep against known or suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets (VP Biden has been the primary proponent of this approach).

Counter-Insurgency Strategy in Afghanistan

The architects of the COIN strategy for winning the struggle in Afghanistan are Generals Dave Petraeus (US Army) and Jim Mattis (US Marine Corps), as laid out in the combined Field Manual 3-24. The key precepts of this doctrine are that victory will come when the citizens of Afghanistan render allegiance to the government in Kabul, reject the threats or incentives of the Taliban, are able to pursue a livelihood in a secure environment, and refuse sanctuary to terrorist forces. The mission is to deliver security and connect Afghans to their government.

This is to be accomplished not by “body counts” or blowing up villages indiscriminately, but by being embedded with the Afghans themselves and meeting with Afghan elders to learn their concerns and needs. Troops must exercise restraint in the application of force, deploy to small outposts, and focus on economic development. This strategy relies heavily on a cadre of Western reconstruction experts being available, a relatively honest and functional central government in Kabul, the transition of the Afghan Army and national police to an effective fighting and security force, and citizen willingness to inform on Taliban/AQ insurgent locations.

Even the most forceful of the adherents of this doctrine admit that progress in all of these areas has been slow, and that victory—however defined—will not come quickly or cheaply. At best it entails the commitment of American troops, and increasingly civilians, and billions—maybe even a trillion– of dollars for at least a decade.

More Restrictive Rules of Engagement

Generals Petraeus and McChrystal and their superiors are in lock step on the wisdom of this approach. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argues that “Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way……The battlefield is not necessarily a field anymore. It is in the minds of the people”. He argues that in this war restrictions must be placed on use of indirect fires, drones and long range artillery/naval gunfire, saying that, with respect to the application of force, “less really is more”.

Despite his background as a Special Operations warrior, M4 placed considerable restrictions on indiscrimate “knocking doors” down, especially limiting indirect fires and night raids. The “Tactical Directive on Night Raids”, which I have seen, stresses that night raids are the single biggest factor in lessening support for ISAF, that “all other options must be explored before effecting a night raid”, and, if employed, must be “judiciously used, tactically sound, and as transparent as possible”.

Going beyond these restrictions, the U.S. military has even begun awarding medals for “conspicuous restraint” in the application of force. That is, applauding the courage of the soldiers who, despite the potential of an insurgent ambush, exercise caution in place of the “shooting first, taking names later” philosophy. Obviously this stress on “population-centric” military action rankles some soldiers in the field who feel they are being asked to perform dangerous tasks in a very restrictive combat environment. The proscriptions seem to multiply as each lower level HQ seeks to implement the ROEs, resulting in fewer patrols, less “kinetic” activity, and an avoidance of “incidents”.

M4 and his critics

We now have a professional military greatly influenced by Greg Mortensen (“Three Cups of Tea”), one now focused on nation-building, protecting the population, constructing schools, training Afghan security forces, and exercising “restraint” on the battlefield. So much so that conservative former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy charges that M4, who voted for Obama it appears, is “for his entire undeniable valor, a progressive big-thinker who has been conducting a sociology experiment in Islamic nation-building”. He charges that our troops are under “increasingly straight-jacketed ROEs imposed by GEN McChrystal to avoid offending Afghans”. Too much emphasis on drinking tea with Afghan elders at too many Shuras in order to insure the possibility of the imposition of Islamic Sharia law, he argues!

Other critics, such as George Will, were taken aback by some of the lesser noted revelations in the Rolling Stone piece on the “Runaway General”. Specifically, M4’s predilection for a “Zen” approach to combat—he liked to be called the Zen Master and instructed his staff to provide him a Bruce Lee quote on a daily basis. I guess that what M4 aspired to is to be the synthesis of “warrior” and “reflective philosopher” as embodied in Zen philosophy.

In contrast, the Obama-Panetta-Biden Trio Stresses Aggressive Tactics

It seems that the Obama administration feels less shackled by a “pop-centric” COIN strategy, and is relying increasingly on drone attacks against suspected AQ/Taliban strongholds, not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other locales. Critics have charged that the Predator/UAV attacks and secret employment of Special Ops forces under CIA control against suspected targets is, in reality, an illegal scheme of “targeted assassinations”.

That charge is not without grounds. The clearest public description of this doctrine came from White House CT expert, John Brennan, who said that the U.S. “will not merely respond after the fact of a terrorist attack”, but will “take the fight to Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond”. Wow, sounds somewhat reminiscent of Bush 43’s “pre-emption doctrine”!

CIA Director Leon Panetta stated forcefully today that while “We don’t have an assassination list…..we do have a terrorist list”, and several suspected AQ/Taliban figures are on it, including some U.S. citizens. The White House and Panetta’s Agency and his forces seem bound by much less restrictive Rules of Engagement! (You might want to Google Panetta’s appearance on “This Week” today—he comes across sounding more like George Patton than George Kennan!)

So is there really a civil-military split and what are the core differences?

Yes, there is, but a much different one than you normally hear. The professional military approach, one supported by Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen, stresses that this conflict will be prolonged and difficult, that the military needs to have the resources (manpower, money and many more civilian experts) to conduct the COIN strategy over time, and that the Commander in Chief needs to be more vociferous in enunciating and demanding support for the commitment. While all key players in the chain of command signed on to the July 2011 reduction of troops, the military will be resisting, saying that can happen only if “conditions on the ground warrant”.

In contrast, the civilian leadership is very worried about the human and monetary drain Afghanistan represents, that the effort has lost the support of the voters who see this increasingly as a quagmire, and that it is only one of many crises the administration must address—the Oil Spill, a second recession, accelerating deficits, health care, and, yes, climate change! The White House will be leaning toward troop withdrawals, shifting to a “counter-terrorism” strategy, and looking for an attractive “exit strategy”.

Stay tuned!

Tyrus W. Cobb

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Should the President Accept or Demand GEN McChrystal’s Resignation?

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Rex

McChrystal Submits Resignation

Should the President Accept It?

GEN Stanley McChrystal has apparently submitted his resignation to President Obama, following a very damaging series of interviews he and his staff did for a reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine. It’s only the latest in a series of missteps and gaffes committed by a very dedicated and talented field commander, but one who has a knack for demonstrating extraordinarily bad judgment in the public arena.

One has to wonder, first, what the hell McChrystal was thinking in granting so much access to a reporter from Rolling Stone? One has to assume that he would realize that the correspondent, Michael Hastings, had little interest in reporting the nuances of successes the General’s counter-insurgency campaign had racked up. More to the point, his primary purpose would be to elicit juicy comments and critiques of the civilian leadership in order to make the story a sexy sale at the news stands. In that Hastings succeeded and the General and his staff fell feet first into the trap.

In the story, which will be available Friday but is attached here (“The Runaway General”) McChrystal says little, criticizing only Obama in one instance and AMB Holbrooke in another. But his staff went far beyond, calling the National Security Advisor (4-star Marine General) Jim Jones a “clown”, the Vice President as a know-nothing irritant (you mean “Bite Me”, not “Biden”, said one staffer), accused the President of being totally unprepared for a session with McChrystal, hammered AMB Holbrooke, and denigrated the President’s team unmercifully (many of whom are 3-4 star Generals and Admirals).

We should understand that the General’s interviews, and that of his staff, come in the midst of a sense that the mission in Afghanistan is failing. There seems to be no credible central government in Kabul, the Afghan national police and Army have fallen far short of expectations, corruption and mismanagement are rampant, and the Taliban seems to be making significant operational gains. In this general downturn no doubt some will be looking how to shift the blame for ultimate failure.

It might be hard for McChrystal to argue that he did not get the resources he asked for to implement his war strategy. Certainly the President gave him 95% of it. Or that the strategy is directed by Washington—the COIN tactics being pursued in the field are certainly those advocated by the military establishment. The General would have a good case that the commitment to begin withdrawing troops in July of 2011 gave the wrong signal to the enemy as well as to the Kabul government, but everyone in the chain of command is on record saying that they agreed with that commitment.

The quotes illustrate also how dysfunctional the civil-military relationship in Afghanistan has become, with (retired 3-star General) Ambassador Karl Eikenberry at odds with McChrystal and ISAF. Quite a contrast with the excellent working relationship AMB Ryan Crocker and GEN Dave Petraeus had in Iraq!

My colleague, Steve Metcalf, has noted that “The death of a warrior….is always a sad event, particularly when he has served so honorably for so many years”. But, Metcalf argues, the General’s continuing challenge of the political leadership (remember his outspoken comments in London at the IISS last year, or his very public differences with AMB Eikenberry), “has reached a level that can no longer be countenanced”. I agree.

The frustration that the General and, especially his staff, is feeling is mainly an outgrowth of the sense that public opinion in America has given up on the wisdom of the commitment in Afghanistan, and that this weariness is manifesting itself at the highest levels of the White House. Increasingly there is a sense that the war is unwinnable, that we are being “held captive” by a corrupt and intransigent Karzai, and that the military strategy Obama agreed to support is not tenable.

GEN McChrystal (or his staff) complained that he was “betrayed” by AMB Eikenberry, that Obama handed him “an unsellable position”, that the NSC was unsupportive (GEN Jones and LTG Doug Lute ??), mocked VP Biden’s alternative in Afghanistan (“Counter-terrorism”), dissed a meeting with the President as a “10-minue photo-op”, and described AMB Dick Holbrooke as “dangerous—because he is a wounded animal”.

The President faces a difficult decision tomorrow, but despite GEN McChrystal’s extraordinary experience, record and dedication, the President should accept his resignation and move on. That will be painful for all concerned, and both the Commander in Chief and his field commander are badly wounded from this encounter.

But the General wasn’t elected, as was the President. Maybe he will be in the future! Doubt it—the “stab in the back” rhetoric won’t find much ground here and the American public will be hard pressed to believe that if only the nuanced differences in the General’s strategy were adopted, we would have secured a certain victory in Afghanistan.

Stay tuned! Would love to be a fly on the wall in that Oval office session tomorrow.

– Ty

mCcHRYSTALPPM130_r1109mcchrystal

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Understanding the Border Security Debate

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Rex

Colleagues:
Rather long submission today, but worth reading. Two views on the immigration/border security issue.
Might want to read the second first, which is a comment by a retired Admiral (“W”) and a piece arguing the traditional case that we haven’t secured the border, but it can be done fairly easy and cheaply, etc. (Reflecting “We the People” stance).
With respect to money, the blog piece does lay out an interesting question: If it is cost we are concerned about, why do we have 37,000 troops along the DMZ in Korea instead of along the Southwest U.S. border? Where is the greater threat to U.S. national security?
The first piece, from the Arizona Republic, is one of the most comprehensive and thorough analyses I have read on the question. It goes into the “secure border” issue in much more detail and is more even-handed. It lays out what has been done to date (extensive) and the obstacles to actually “securing the border”. The piece basically says that while you can’t attain a 100% secure border, you can improve on border security–but the cost accelerates exponentially. Are we prepared to bear the cost?
At any rate, the two pieces–especially the Arizona Republic article–should be read and absorbed by anyone wishing to make commentary on the border security issue.
One major conclusion: Take with a healthy grain of salt anyone who argues that we haven’t tried securing the border or that it is relatively easy to do.
– Ty
1. http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/06/20/20100620border-security-arizona.html#ixzz0rVWVqds9

Political rhetoric ignores border reality

‘Secure first’ calls ignore facts, undermine reform

Dennis Wagner – Jun. 20, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Amid a growing national angst about illegal immigration, Americans keep hearing a chorus: Secure the border first. Then talk about immigration reform.

The idea appeals to public sentiment, and it seems like a simple demand

But what do pundits and politicians mean?

Is a border secure only when no one crosses illegally and when no contraband slips through?

If some permeability is acceptable, what is the tolerable amount?

Political leaders mostly dodge those questions, and for good reason: Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.

One reason: There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.

Another reason: The motivation and creativity of those trying to get across.

Impoverished Mexicans, willing to gamble their lives and savings to reach America, subject themselves to desert heat and extortion or torture by coyotes. Drug runners risk being caught and imprisoned or getting killed by competitors.

So the smugglers dig tunnels, create false compartments, bribe border guards, fly ultralight planes and use every means imaginable to get over, under or across the line. The more security there is, the higher the smuggling price and the greater the profit incentive.

Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America’s toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.

No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform “until the nation’s jails are secure.”

Tom Barry, director of the Transborder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., said the demand for a completely secure border is a ploy by those opposed to immigration reform to prevent new policies.

“No matter how much enforcement you have, there will always be people coming through,” he said. “Since that is true, opponents to immigration reform will always be able to say the border is still not secure . . . and therefore we cannot pass immigration reform.”

At some point, the question becomes: How much border enforcement is necessary? Or enough?

David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego, said the United States has more federal agents deployed along the Mexican line than at any time in the past century.

“It seems to me the argument can be made that we’ve gone as far as is reasonable,” he said. “The border will never be secure enough for some people. . . . Politicians are using the idea of the border as a phantom menace and establishing an unreachable goal.”

Border enforcement rises

For the past decade, critics have complained that the U.S. government does little or nothing to stem the flow of undocumented intruders.

“Our nation’s border security efforts are a litany of failure,” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., wrote in a recent commentary for the congressional newspaper The Hill. “Ultimately, Congress must fix our broken immigration laws. . . . But we cannot address that difficult task until we, as a nation, control our own borders.”

While the success of America’s border enforcement may be questioned, historical data reflect an escalation of effort:

• Today, there are 22,800 U.S. Border Patrol agents, five times the number in 1993. About 17,000 agents work along the Southwest corridor, double the number from seven years ago. They are supported by National Guard troops, local police and thousands of port officers using everything from drug-sniffing dogs to gamma-ray machines.

• In Arizona, the primary smuggling corridor on the U.S.-Mexico line, there are now more than 3,600 Border Patrol agents, about 10 for every mile of boundary with Mexico.

• The budget this fiscal year for Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency charged with guarding U.S. borders, is about $17 billion, double what was spent in 2003.

• The number of illegal immigrants arrested by Border Patrol has plummeted by almost two-thirds in just five years, a combined result, authorities say, of fewer people trying to cross because of the economy and increased security.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the Southwest border is “as secure now as it has ever been.” Challenging the sincerity of lawmakers who demand security, she asked, “Will it ever be reached as far as Congress is concerned, or will that goal post continue to be moved?”

Still, amid a decade of record spending on enforcement – increases that began under Republican President George W. Bush, who twice tried and failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform – America’s estimated illegal-immigrant population increased from 8.5 million to 11. 9 million. The vast majority of the immigrants came from Mexico.

‘Operational control’

Apprehensions of illegal crossers in the desert began to decline only in the past few years, as the nation’s economy and job market collapsed. In 2009, Border Patrol agents arrested 550,000 undocumented immigrants on the Southwestern border, though that is considered a fraction of the total slipping through. Drug seizures continue to increase, though it is unclear how much of that reflects increased trafficking and how much is a result of improved enforcement.

Amid the ebb and flow of statistics, the calls for tighter border security continue.

But public understanding is stymied by simplistic notions of border dynamics and geography.

Those unfamiliar with the vast border zone have little sense of its challenges or the creativity of trespassers. Many ignore the value of the millions of legal crossings each year, the vital importance of legitimate trade and the fact that border crime is a two-way street.

According to Alonzo Peña, deputy assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, each year $19 billion to $29 billion from illegal-drug and human trafficking is smuggled from the United States into Mexico, where it is used by drug cartels to finance their violent operations. Only $200 million gets seized. As part of controlling the border, the southward flow of cash and arms also must be stopped.

Gustavo Mohar, Mexico’s intelligence chief, shakes his head at the idea of securing such a huge swath, an area exceeding 100,000 square miles.

“The correct word is ‘managing’ a border,” he said. “You cannot close it.”

Even the U.S. Border Patrol does not set its sights on complete security. Instead, its mission is to establish “operational control,” a term defined by Congress as the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries.

This year, Border Patrol claimed success along 894 miles of boundary, less than half of the Mexican line, or about one-tenth of the nation’s land and sea perimeter. Even in sectors that are supposedly under control, Border Patrol records show, smugglers and illegal immigrants get through by the thousands.

Some anti-illegal-immigration groups acknowledge that fully securing the border is a pipe dream.

“I couldn’t, if you held a gun to my head, tell you it could ever be done 100 percent,” said Bill Davis, director of Cochise County Militia, a group of armed civilians who patrol Arizona’s southern flank. “If you can cut it down from 100,000 (illegal entries) to two people, great.”

Davis, who advocates a doubling of manpower and technology, said a border is controlled when agents monitoring surveillance cameras and sensors receive no more than one alert per night.

Appealing to fear

No matter how many federal troops and agents are on patrol, no matter how many sensors, cameras and fences are employed, many will try to sneak across the border, and some will succeed.

Each time that happens, opponents of immigration reform will be able to declare that the line is not defended, that America is not safe.

They appeal to patriotism, asking why the world’s most powerful nation cannot protect its sovereign boundaries.

They appeal to fear, suggesting that terrorists potentially could mix in with the daily swarm of Hispanics heading north for opportunity.

Public passion is so high, said the Transborder Project’s Barry, that no one does a cost-benefit analysis of border enforce- ment.

“Everybody is jumping on the border-security bandwagon, including moderate Democrats,” Barry said. “It’s not driven by anything real on the grid, not by violence or invasions of illegal immigrants . . . not based on any real assessment of threats to the nation.”

The rhetoric is magnified by fears that Mexico’s explosive cartel violence may bleed over the international line. In fact, FBI and Arizona records show crime is dramatically down statewide and along the border. Murders in Arizona decreased by one-fifth last year; aggravated assaults dropped nearly 9 percent.

Those numbers provide little consolation to southern Arizona residents weary of undocumented immigrants and armed drug couriers traipsing across their properties. Still, the statistics contradict claims of a crisis.

“I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse,” said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. “Well, the fact of the matter is, the border has never been more secure.”

Calls for reform

At the Washington, D.C.-based (very anti-immigration) Federation for American Immigration Reform, press secretary Bob Dane described border enforcement without reform as “a fool’s paradise.”

FAIR presses Congress to impose rigid immigration limits, opposing an amnesty program or an increase in the number of work visas.

Dane said most of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants came to America for work, so there is a simple policy change that would force them out: Require employee verification and crack down on businesses that hire undocumented workers.

“Simply declaring the border is secure without workplace enforcement is like putting locks on the door with a sign that says, ‘The jewels are all yours if you can find a way in,’ ” Dane said. “The jobs magnet is the reason folks come and the reason they stay.”

Susan Ginsburg, senior policy adviser for an international nonprofit known as Borderpol, which works to make international borders safer, said it is a mistake to require border control as a prerequisite for changing U.S. policies because the existing system created a broken border in the first place.

“Comprehensive immigration reform will help because it will make the border more manageable,” she said.

Michele Wucker, executive director of the World Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said border incursions happen wherever two countries have unequal economies or black-market trade.

Wucker, author of “Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong,” said those who demand a sort of iron curtain prior to policy change are obstructionists: “It means don’t ever come up with a workable system.”

Arizona has the most to gain from a new policy paradigm, Wucker argued, because the status quo made the state a thoroughfare for smuggling. Yet the state’s political leaders, caught up in a wave of public opinion, no longer press for reform.

“When I see John McCain saying, ‘Build the dang fence,’ I’m very sad,” Wucker said. “Arizona would benefit more than any other state from immigration reform at a national level. They’re really cutting off their nose to spite their face.”

///////////////

2.  Subject: Fwd: Interesting Article

Admiral’s comment: “Meanwhile, Senators Kyl and McCain are calling for more technology (in addition to troops and agents) on the border. Nothing forthcoming there, either, except more legal blatherings from the Administration over who runs immigration policy and enforcement–all headed to the Supreme court, probably by year’s end.
Meanwhile all government is doing is putting up signs. Pathetic! Some technology to wonder about: UAVs (Predators), tethered balloons with remotely aimed cameras/videos, “Dufflebag” (Vietnam era remote sensors), mast-attached sensors, and quick reaction response teams to intercept illegal groups penetrating. We know the routes, the region (where to put up signs!)…and who’s responsible for developing the technology McCain and Kly are calling for? Who funds it, through which government organs: Pentagon DARPA, DHS, Justice, Industry? This probably hasn’t been decided….
W

Ceding Arizona To Mexico

June 21, 2010 by Bob Livingston (posted on his blog)

Ceding Arizona To MexicoAmerica is losing the battle along the border with Mexico —  apparently without a fight. As proof, a swatch of Arizona 80 miles wide that runs from the Mexican border about three counties deep into the state (encompassing about 3,500 acres) has been ceded to Mexicans.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told Fox News that armed paramilitary elements control a portion of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and other parts of Arizona. But rather than try and reclaim it, signs have been posted marking the area as off limits to Americans.

It was closed in October 2006, due to human safety concerns, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The signs read: “Danger—Public Warning. Travel Not Recommended.” To see a clip of Babeu’s interview click here.

The squad-sized (in American military parlance a squad refers to two teams of four or five soldiers each) armed paramilitary elements Babeu referred to are drug smugglers and human traffickers out of Mexico. And violence there has increased the last fourth months.

He conceded that neither he nor other local sheriff’s departments and city police forces had the manpower to take the area back. It’s going to take the U.S. military, he said, and that’s why Babeu, his fellow law enforcement heads and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) recently asked Obama for 3,000 National Guard troops.

Obama responded by promising Arizona Governor Jan Brewer he’d get back to her. He hasn’t.

As I wrote last week in Breaking Their Oath, this is not the only place armed elements have crossed the Mexican border in the U.S. There have been many sightings reported—and several videos made to back them up—of either elements of the Mexican military or police forces crossing the border in force. There have also been shootouts with U.S. Border agents.

Just recently a young smuggler was killed by U.S. Border agents and armed agents from Mexico fired on them as they investigated the scene of the shooting.

Breaking Their Oath demonstrated how Obama and the current Congress, as well as Presidents and Congresses past, have failed to live up to their oath of office and protect America from invasion.

The situation in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge demonstrates that the fascist elected elites are either feckless and weak or they have an agenda that is contrary to the best interests of our nation. It also demonstrates why Arizona’s recently passed immigration law was necessary.

There were a lot of interesting comments to last week’s article. The vast majority agreed with Arizona’s soon-to-be-enacted immigration law which will make it a crime to be an illegal alien in the state.

Al Seiber is very familiar with what’s going on in Arizona. He has friends near the border. He posted,

“My friends live 1200′ from the border, out of Sierra Vista, Ariz. they told me they find more prayer mats then anything. I find lot’s of back packs, with tortillas and water bottles in them.”

Some commenters think the answer is a fence along the border: a fence that Washington obviously has no interest in completing. There are places—like the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding territory—where agents don’t go, but armed insurgents from across the border do. And ask the residents of some of the border towns about the armed Mexican helicopters—sometimes seen hovering over houses and shining spotlights at night as if searching for someone or something—and how they feel about what is being done to protect them.

Certainly more could be done by the Federal government.

“Why do we have 37,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, but we can’t put enough on our borders to protect us? Or, we could reduce the size of Empire America and just bring those troops home and put them along our border. But visiting Arizona is always a good idea.

“I would like to challenge any person that is against the Arizona immigration bill to call your representatives in congress, also write a letter to Obama and tell them that the federal immigration law needs to be shredded and a new one needs to be written up. Because, in case you are like Obama, Holder and Napolitano who didn’t take time to read the bill but got on tv and condemned it, I have actually read the bill and it is EXACTLY like the federal bill. So if you are accusing Arizonians of being profilers then you are in fact accusing your liberal icons of profiling.”

The grammar’s not great, but you get the drift. Actually, letting your elected representative know how you feel about the illegal immigration situation is not a bad idea. So we’ve come up with a way you can do that. So far 97 percent believe America should follow Arizona’s lead when it comes to immigration reform. And a whopping 92 percent of respondents would like to see their state pass a similar immigration law.

You can also contact your Congressman and let him or her know how you feel. If you don’t know how to contact your Senator or Representative you can find him or her by going here.

“’We the People’ need to start being seen in ‘GREATER’ numbers and heard from in masses. We need to see and hear from candidates where they stand on major issues and hold them accountable. Why is it we are not asking our candidates or elected officials outright on their stance with major issues as immigration. Quit hiding….. NOW is our opportunity to be heard….NOW is our opportunity to be seen…. November is coming soon…. don’t pass it up.”

Why indeed? What better way to know where they stand than by asking them yourself? We’ve done the hard part for you. You no longer have an excuse.

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Two key U.S. allies,Turkey and Israel, drift toward hostilities

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Rex

Colleagues: Two articles of interest today on Turkey and Israel, both highly critical of each country. Mark Steyn draws our attention to the highly worrisome turn by Turkish leaders away from the pro-Western, modernizing, partner of Israel, secularized Muslim country it became under Attaturk and subsequent governments until Recep Erdogan became Prime Minister. Turkey today is moving closer not only to the Muslim Jihadists, but developing alliances with the world’s “outlaw” states–Syria, Iran, Venezuela, etc. Paul Krugman takes Israel to task as well, decrying Tel Aviv’s “go it alone” policies, its drift away from a close alliance with the U.S., it’s clumsy attacks on the Turkish flotilla, and refusal to budge on Palestinian issues. Both pieces are, of course, overstated, but they do raise important issues for American diplomacy, as two of our principal allies in that crisis-ridden part of the world drift toward an increasingly hostile relationship and growing anti-U.S feelings. “Enjoy”. Ty

Muslim Reform Is Being Reversed By Young Turks In Secular Turkey

Israel must be punished for its “massacre” on Gaza-bound ships, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the Turkish parliament last Tuesday.

By MARK STEYN

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY, 06/04/2010

Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc.

You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla.

Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks.

In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the state of Israel.

Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry.

I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay.

Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day what was formerly the Zionist Entity’s staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan -of-the-month club member.

As the think-tankers like to say: “Who lost Turkey?” In a nutshell: Kemal Ataturk. Since he founded post-Ottoman Turkey in his own image nearly nine decades ago, the population has increased from 14 million to over 70 million. But that fivefold increase is not evenly distributed.

The short version of Turkish demographics in the 20th century is that Rumelian Turkey — i.e., western, European, secular, Kemalist Turkey — has been out-bred by Anatolian Turkey — i.e., eastern, rural, traditionalist, Islamic Turkey.

Ataturk and most of his supporters were from Rumelia, and they imposed the modern Turkish republic on a reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. Now they don’t have to accept it. The swelling population has spilled out of its rural hinterland and into the once solidly Kemalist cities.

Do you ever use the expression “young Turks”? I heard it applied to the starry-eyed ideologues around Obama the other day. The phrase comes from the original “young Turks,” the youthful activists agitating for reform in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. The very words acknowledge the link between political and demographic energy.

Today, the “young Turks” are old Turks: The heirs to the Kemalist reformers who gave women the vote before Britain did are a population in demographic decline. There will be fewer of them in every election. Today’s young Turks are men who think as Erdogan does.

That doesn’t mean Turkey is Iran or Waziristan or Saudi Arabia, but it does mean that the country’s leadership is in favor of more or less conventional Islamic imperialism. As Erdogan’s most famous sound bite puts it: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims.

Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now, but just a few years ago there was talk about whether General Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat.

Demography is destiny, for the most part. For example, European Muslim populations are young, fast-growing and profoundly hostile to Jews. European Jewish populations are old, fading and irrelevant to domestic electoral calculations. Think of your stereotypically squishy pol, and then figure the reserves of courage it would require for the European establishment not to be anti-Israeli, and, indeed, ever more anti-Israeli as the years go by.

But demography alone isn’t always destiny. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. Bismarck’s famous remark that, if the British Army invaded Germany, he’d send the local police force to arrest them is generally taken as a sneer at the minimal size of Her Britannic Majesty’s armed forces. But, in another sense, it’s a testament to how much the British accomplished with so little.

Erdogan would not be palling up to Ahmadinejad and Boy Assad in Syria and even Sudan’s genocidal President Bashir, the Butcher of Darfur, if he were mindful of Turkey’s relationship with the United States. But he isn’t. He looks at the American hyperpower and sees, to all intents, a late Ottoman sultan — pampered, decadent, lounging on its cushions puffing a hookah but unable to rouse itself to impose its will in the world.

In that sense, Turkey’s contempt for Israel is also an expression of near total contempt for Washington.

Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as “the post-American world”?

Well, look at it as if you’re sitting in the presidential palace of some other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO’s only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria.

And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.

///////////

June 2, 2010

Saving Israel From Itself

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When reports first circulated on Twitter of a deadly attack by Israeli commandos on the Gaza flotilla, I didn’t forward them because they seemed implausible. I thought: Israel wouldn’t be so obtuse as to use lethal force on self-described peace activists in international waters with scores of reporters watching.

Ah, but it turned out that Israel could be so obtuse after all. It shot itself in the foot, blasting American toes as well, and undermined all of its longer-term strategic objectives.

Abba Eban, the former Israeli statesman, is famously reported to have said in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The quotation resonated because it was largely true.

Palestinians were locked for years into a self-defeating dynamic of violence and self-pity that led to terrorism and intransigence. Feeling misunderstood, they shrugged at global opinion and lashed back wherever they could, undermining their own cause.

Yet now, as a rabbi noted on my Facebook page, it is Israel that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems locked in a self- defeating dynamic in which it feels misunderstood and gives up on international opinion. It lashes out with force in ways that undermine its own interests. It is on a path that could eventually be catastrophic.

There’s no question that Israel faces existential threats. That should make its leaders focused above all on two things: an Arab-Israeli treaty and pressure on Iran to drop its nuclear program.

These aren’t easy, and a Palestinian-Israeli deal may be impossible for the time being. But Israel could freeze all settlements and take other steps that would make a deal more likely. We already know what the final deal would look like — a two-state solution and terms resembling the “Clinton parameters” that Bill Clinton proposed in 2000.

Israel could also cultivate Turkey, a central player in the effort to press Iran. Instead, Israel’s storming of a Turkish-flagged vessel in international waters was a huge setback to efforts to win new sanctions on Iran. One big winner in this week’s fiasco was the Iranian regime.

Israel is also antagonizing its support base in the United States, which is critical to protect it from those existential threats.

Peter Beinart wrote a powerful article in the most recent New York Review of Books exploring the way young Jews in America feel much less identification with Israel than their elders did. Mr. Beinart noted that even the student Senate at Brandeis University, which has strong Jewish ties, rejected a resolution commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel.

One basic problem, Mr. Beinart said, is that the Zionist movement has become increasingly conservative politically. “For several decades,” he writes, “the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Israel’s hard-line policies are depleting America’s international political capital as well as its own. Gen. David Petraeus noted two months ago that the perception that the United States favors Israel breeds anti-Americanism and bolsters Al Qaeda. The chief of Mossad, Meir Dagan, was quoted in the Israeli press as making the point more succinctly: “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

For many Israelis, all this seems profoundly unfair. Israel is a thriving democracy that withdrew from Gaza but is still threatened by missiles from north and south alike. So Israel and its hard-core supporters tend to dismiss outside criticism as inherently unfair and anti-Semitic, and embrace unilateral solutions based on force. As the newspaper Haaretz suggested, Israel is now “lost at sea.”

How do we change this dynamic? One necessary step is a major investigation of what happened. Another is a quick end to the blockade of Gaza, by Egypt as well as Israel. The blockade has failed to topple Hamas, failed to recover the captured soldier Gilad Shalit, and failed to keep rockets out of Gaza.

When you visit Gaza, you see that the siege has accomplished nothing — except to devastate the lives of 1.5 million ordinary Gazans. Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, has compiled a list of goods that Israel typically blocks from Gaza: notebooks, blank paper, writing utensils, coriander, chocolate, fishing rods, and countless more. That’s not security; that’s a travesty.

President Obama needs to find his voice and push hard for an end to the Gaza blockade. He needs to talk sense to Israel and encourage it to back away from its plans to intercept other flotillas now headed for Gaza — that would be a catastrophe for Israel and America alike.

Above all, he needs to nudge Israel away from its tendency to shoot itself in the foot, and us along with it.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off

Israel, Turkey, NATO and the US after the Israeli “assault” on the convoy

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Rex
Colleagues:
There has been much written about the Israeli boarding of the convoy of ships organized by Turkish activists bringing “humanitarian materials” to Gaza that resulted in a number of deaths of those on the ship. Israel has proven that its sailors were fired on first from one ship, and that it was provoked, but its clumsy actions have still summoned broad condemnation.
The incident will further isolate Israel in the court of public opinion, lead to increased friction in U.S.-Israeli relations, build support for the Palestinians (and maybe Hamas), and possibly push Turkey even further into a stronger position of support for the Arab-Palestinian cause.
The intent of the convoys was really to break the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza, that has grown in the past several years as Hamas has gained greater control of the beleaguered strip of land. As one observer noted, “The intent was not to deliver wheelchairs  to Grandma in Gaza; it was to get the Israelis to over-react (which they did) or open up the ports (which they didn’t).
Ironically PM Bibi Netanyahu was due to make an official visit to Washington today, that obviously had to be canceled.
Here’s an interesting issue to consider that some experts on other national security loops I am on have seriously debated. Turkey is a member of NATO, and Article 5 of the NATO treaty states that if one member is attacked, all members will come to their aid (not necessarily by military means). Will Turkey seek to invoke that clause??? If so, what does the US and Europe do then?
So far Prime Minister Erdogan has resisted that ploy, but Ankara could call for a NATO summit meeting on the incident. Further, at this time Turkey is a member of the UN Security Council–will they attempt to summon the Council to condemn Israel?
What would Israel be guilty of? Well, for starters, the “assault” on the ships (boarding by rappelling down from helicopters) took place in international waters. Is this not piracy by any definition of that term? Must NATO or the US respond to this “piracy on the high seas” lest its arguments for taking on the Somali pirates lose their impetus?
One can say that Israel was screwed whatever it did. That is true, but Tel Aviv’s handling of the incident and the aftermath certainly isn’t the country’s finest hour.
For those wishing a more in-depth analysis of the incident, I am including one by conservative analyst and friend of Israel, Max Boot.
Enjoy! Ty

Israel’s Gaza Flotilla Fiasco

Israel had no obligation to allow the ships to reach Gaza, but surely there was a smarter way to stop them.

By MAX BOOT

Israel’s actions in boarding the flotilla of ships bound for the Gaza Strip were entirely justified and perhaps even unavoidable. Unfortunately they turned into a tactical and strategic fiasco that does further damage to the Jewish State’s tattered international reputation.

The so-called Gaza flotilla, comprising eight ships and roughly 800 participants, was not put together by peace-loving humanitarians primarily worried about relieving the suffering of Gaza residents. The people of Gaza already have access to food, medicine and other relief supplies provided by both Egypt and Israel. But both countries have sought to limit the importation of military equipment or dual-use materiel that can be employed for military purposes by Hamas. That terrorist organization controls the Gaza Strip and is unabashedly dedicated to Israel’s eradication. It is also closely linked with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated to the overthrow of secular dictator Hosni Mubarak and the creation of a theocratic regime in Egypt.

The flotilla was organized by the Turkish group Insani Yardim Vakfi (Humanitarian Relief Foundation), which bills itself as a philanthropic organization. But both the Danish Institute for International Studies and the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center have documented copious links between Insani Yardim Vakfi and the global jihadist terrorist movements including al Qaeda. One of Insani Yardom Vakfi’s activists, Izza Shahin, was arrested by Israeli forces in the West Bank recently and expelled on charges of transferring tens of thousands of dollars to Hamas-controlled “charities.”

Other members of the flotilla came from such organizations as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al Jazeera quoted one woman aboard the flotilla saying “Right now we face one of two happy endings: either Martyrdom or reaching Gaza.”

From Israel’s vantage point this was a no-win situation. Allow the ships to dock in Gaza and they would unload supplies that might be used to arm Hamas. Stop the ships and you risk a public relations disaster, which is exactly what happened.

First the ships ignored repeated warnings from the Israeli navy to turn back or to put into the Israeli port of Ashdod where the supplies could be off-loaded, inspected, and, if purely humanitarian, sent on to the Gaza Strip. They kept on sailing even after Israel publicly warned that its commandos would board the vessels.

Most of the boardings, with commandos rappelling down ropes from helicopters, went smoothly. But aboard the largest vessel, the Turkish-flagged ferry Mavi Marmara, the passengers and crew put up a violent resistance. The Israeli Defense Forces have released video showing a commando being hurled from the top deck. Other commandos were confronted by an angry crowd armed with metal poles, knives, even reportedly firearms and firebombs.

The details are still confusing, but it’s clear Israeli commandos were wounded in the melee and were in danger of being killed. They had hoped to avoid violence and were armed with paintball guns, but the boarding team felt compelled to open fire to prevent themselves from being overrun.

It is hard to second-guess the actions of men in combat who feel their lives are in danger, but that won’t prevent the whole world from trying. Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, described the incident as “state terrorism” and called his ambassador home from Israel. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the incident “a massacre.”

Non-Arab leaders didn’t go that far but French President Nicolas Sarkozy did call the use of force “disproportionate”—the favorite epithet applied nowadays to all Israeli military actions, even those (like the assassination in Dubai of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh) that only kill well-known terrorists.

Israeli officials are right to say the operation was justified and that the blood was on the hands of the pro-Hamas activists. Right, but irrelevant.

As it does too often, Israel took a narrow military operational approach to what is a broader strategic problem. Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups are conducting a skillful “information war” that is making Israel a pariah state in the international community. Israel, like the United States and other democratic nations, is at a severe disadvantage trying to combat a ruthless foe willing to sacrifice its own people to score propaganda points.

There are no perfect counter-tactics available, but whenever Israel does use military force it needs to be more aware of the political ramifications. That awareness appeared to be lacking during the botched 2006 war against Hezbollah—and in the boarding of the Gaza flotilla.

One wonders if it wouldn’t have been possible for Israeli agents to sabotage the ships before they left port so that this incident would never have occurred? Or failing that, to allow the ships to be off-loaded in Gaza and then disable them so as to prevent any further trips.

That is only speculation from afar. Neither I nor any other outsider can know all the factors that went into Israeli planning. But, whatever the intent, the outcome was a fiasco that Israel doesn’t need when its relations with the United States, its most important (and virtually sole) ally, are already at a low point.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Posted in Israel, Middle East | Comments Off

Civil-Military Dust-Up and are we already moving to Plan B?

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Rex
The White House has obviously leaked minutes of highly secret meetings, as well as the photo earlier showing GEN McChrystal on Obama’s plane in an almost supplicant position, to demonstrate the President’s firm control over the military.
While much of the hype over Obama’s supposed dressing down of the Pentagon/military was orchestrated out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., one thing is clear: Obama is committed to the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawal schedules and he wants the Pentagon/key Generals on record as having supported that decision. That is, no later claims of being “abandoned in the field” just as “victory was around the corner”. May also be a preemptive  move against any General who might harbor ambitions to run for President in 2012!
Les Gelb has an interesting take on all this (below). I think much of this is also a prelude to a Plan B–what happens if the Iraqis/Afghani are not ready to assume control of their countries as we withdraw. It appears that VP Biden’s alternative to the Petraeus/McChrystal plan–reduce our troop presence, do little nation-building, and concentrate on a counter-terrorism strategy (bomb known or suspected AQ/Taliban locations) will eventually win out
I suspect that handling the “exit strategy” and managing the region in the wake of a failure to accomplish our objectives will become more important points of debate and discussion. Ty
Time
June 7, 2010

Logic Of The Leak

Why would the White House divulge details of a secret war-strategy session? To force the Pentagon’s hand

By Leslie H. Gelb

In matters of war and peace, presidents expect their generals to give their best advice in private, keep it private and then faithfully carry out the Commander in Chief’s decisions. But whenever wars sour and casualties mount, the perspectives of the White House and the Pentagon brass clash, the military lets its real views be known, and the public-policy brawls erupt. A new round of brawls looms over Afghanistan, and this one could be particularly costly.

This time the trigger is a couple of leaks from the most secret and sensitive White House meetings on Afghan policy. The disclosures can be found in Jonathan Alter’s The Promise: President Obama, Year One, which has just been published, and will also appear in Bob Woodward’s book about Obama due out this fall. They show Obama, much like a prosecutor, nailing down his generals’ support for the U.S. troop withdrawals he would soon announce and trying to stanch the expected opposition. That opposition, the White House is well aware, could be a political killer for Obama, given the military’s unmatchable public credibility. The two leaks — in Alter’s case, quotations from an Oval Office discussion, and in Woodward’s, actual notes from National Security Council meetings — almost certainly came from senior White House officials, likely with Obama’s approval. The exchanges make the President look strong and the military defensive.

The battle between the new President and the Pentagon started last year when the generals asked for thousands more troops for Afghanistan than the White House wanted to deploy.

Last fall, Obama thought he had quieted the brass with a trade-off: he’d meet their demand for 30,000-plus more soldiers (bringing the total to about 100,000), and they’d back his call to begin troop reductions in July 2011. He soon sensed, however, that he’d have to do more to ensure the generals kept their end of the deal. The military still cringed at any hint of a deadline, arguing to fight longer with the full complement of troops in place.

The dramatic Oval Office confrontation cited by Alter came just days before Obama was to announce both the 30,000 force add-ons and the July 2011 date to begin reductions. Attendees included Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, Centcom commander General David Petraeus and National Security Adviser James Jones:

“Obama asked Petraeus, ‘David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?’

‘Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,’ the general replied.

‘Good. No problem,’ the President said. ‘If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?’

‘Yes, sir, in agreement,’ Petraeus said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Mullen said.

The President was crisp but informal. ‘Bob, you have any problems?’ he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it.

The President then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly; focus on al-Qaeda, and build the Afghan army. ‘I’m not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don’t agree with me that we can execute this, say so now,’ he said. No one said anything.

‘Tell me now,’ Obama repeated.

‘Fully support, sir,’ Mullen said.

‘Ditto,’ Petraeus said.”

The White House leaked these conversations in part to show the world that the generals agreed to the July 2011 timetable last fall, whatever doubts they may have about it now. The military will surely be angered by the leaks and may be tempted to retaliate; most officers aren’t crazy about Democrats or about Obama.

This is nasty business by all parties. Yet I have to believe that the leaked accounts are essentially true. They parallel my own conversations with senior officers. Whatever Alter suggests, the military didn’t and doesn’t agree to extracting all the troops in 18 months or any time frame, nor does the White House make that claim.

But whatever the generals really believe now about Afghan policy, they have had their full say, gotten most of the troops they requested and fought the war essentially their way. It’s the President’s responsibility to make the final calls — and to create a force-reduction strategy for Afghanistan that protects what will remain of America’s interests there. The generals can and should help him do that. After 10 years of war in Afghanistan, American arms, men, women and treasure are needed far more elsewhere.

Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is the author of Power Rules and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Posted in Afghanistan, Domestic News, Iraq | Comments Off

An Interesting Look at China’s Ruling Class

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Rex

Missed this when it first came out. An interesting look at the ruling party in China. Ty
  • The Wall Street Journal

China’s Private Party

The Communist Party has made strenuous efforts to keep signs of its enduring power out of sight to the Chinese public and the rest of the world. Richard McGregor on the secrets of the world’s largest political machine and its role in Beijing’s growing clout.

By RICHARD MCGREGOR

On the desks of the heads of China’s 50-odd biggest state companies, amid the clutter of computers, family photos and other fixtures of the modern CEO’s office life, sits a red phone. The executives and their staff who jump to attention when it rings know it as “the red machine,” perhaps because to call it a mere phone does not do it justice. “When the ‘red machine’ rings,” a senior executive of a state bank told me, “you had better make sure you answer it.”

The red machine is like no ordinary phone. Each one has just a four-digit number. It connects only to similar phones with four-digit numbers within the same encrypted system. They are much coveted nonetheless. For the chairmen and women of the top state companies, who have every modern communications device at their fingertips, the red machine is a sign they have arrived, not just at the top of the company, but in the senior ranks of the Party and the government. The phones are the ultimate status symbol, as they are only given out—under the orders of the Party and government—to people in jobs with the rank of vice minister and above.

The phones are encrypted not just to secure party and government communications from foreign intelligence agencies. They also provide protection against snooping by anyone in China outside the party’s governing system. Possession of the red machine means you have qualified for membership of the tight-knit club that runs the country, a small group of about 300 people, mainly men, with responsibility for about one-fifth of humanity.

The modern world is replete with examples of elite networks that wield behind-the-scenes power beyond their mere numerical strength. The United Kingdom had the “old-boy network,” originally coined to describe connections between former students of upper-class, non-government schools; Japan has the Todai elite, graduates of the law school of Tokyo University, an entry point into the long-time ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Finance Ministry and business. The U.S. has the Ivy League, the Beltway, K Street and the military-industrial complex, and a host of other labels to signify the opaque influence of well-connected insiders.

None can hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party, which takes ruling-class networking to an entirely new level. The red machine gives the party apparatus a hotline into multiple arms of the state, including the government-owned companies that China promotes around the world these days as independent commercial entities. As a political machine alone, the Party is a phenomenon of awesome and unique dimensions. By mid-2009, its membership stood at 76 million, equal to about one in 12 adult Chinese.

China’s post-Maoist governing model, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, has endured many attempts to explain it. Is it a benevolent, Singapore-style autocracy? A capitalist development state, as many described Japan? Neo-Confucianism mixed with market economics? A slow-motion version of post-Soviet Russia, in which the elite grabbed productive public assets for private gain? Robber-baron socialism? Or is it something different altogether, an entirely new model, a “Beijing Consensus,” according to the fashionable phrase, built around practical, problem-solving policies and technological innovation?

Few describe the model as communist anymore, often not even the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself.

How communism came to be air-brushed out of the rise of the world’s greatest communist state is no mystery on one level. The multiple, head-spinning contradictions about modern China can throw anyone off the scent. What was once a revolutionary party is now firmly the establishment. The communists rode to power on popular revulsion against corruption but have become riddled by the same cancer themselves. Top leaders adhere to Marxism in their public statements, even as they depend on a ruthless private sector to create jobs. The Party preaches equality, while presiding over incomes as unequal as anywhere in Asia.

The gap between the fiction of the Party’s rhetoric (“China is a socialist country”) and the reality of everyday life grows larger every year. But the Party must defend the fiction nonetheless, because it represents the political status quo.

The Party’s defense of power is also, by extension, a defense of the existing system. In the words of Dai Bingguo, China’s most senior foreign policy official, China’s “number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security.” State sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development, the priorities of any state, all are subordinate to the need to keep the Party in power.

The Party has made strenuous efforts to keep the sinews of its enduring power off the front stage of public life in China and out of sight of the rest of the world. A decade into the 21st century, the Beijing headquarters of the big Party departments, whose power far outstrips that of mere ministries, still have no signs outside indicating the business inside and no listed phone numbers. For many in the West, it has been convenient to keep the Party backstage too, and pretend that China has an evolving governmental system with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and foibles, like any other. China’s flourishing commercial life and embrace of globalization is enough for many to dismiss the idea that communism still has traction, as if a Starbucks on every corner is a marker of political progress.

Peek under the hood of the Chinese model, however, and China looks much more communist than it does on the open road. Vladimir Lenin, who designed the prototype used to run communist countries around the world, would recognize the model immediately. The Chinese Communist Party’s enduring grip on power is based on a simple formula straight out of the Leninist playbook. For all the reforms of the past three decades, the Party has made sure it keeps a lock-hold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People’s Liberation Army.

Since installing itself as the sole legitimate governing authority of a unified China in 1949, the Party and its leaders have placed its members in key positions in every arm, and at each level, of the state. All the Chinese media come under the control of the propaganda department, even if its denizens have had to gallop to keep up in the Internet age. And if anyone decides to challenge the system, the Party has kept ample power in reserve, making sure it maintains a tight grip on the military and the security services, the ultimate guarantors of its rule. The police forces at every level of government, from large cities to small villages, have within them a “domestic security department,” the role of which is to protect the Party’s rule and weed out dissenting political voices before they can gain a broad audience.

China long ago dispensed with old-style communist central planning for a sleeker hybrid market economy, the Party’s greatest innovation. But measure China against a definitional checklist written by Robert Service, the veteran historian of Soviet Russia, and Beijing retains a surprising number of the qualities that characterized communist regimes of the 20th century.

Like communism in its heyday elsewhere, the Party in China has eradicated or emasculated political rivals; eliminated the autonomy of the courts and press; restricted religion and civil society; denigrated rival versions of nationhood; centralized political power; established extensive networks of security police; and dispatched dissidents to labor camps.

The Party in China has teetered on the verge of self-destruction numerous times, in the wake of Mao Zedong’s brutal campaigns over three decades from the 1950s, and then again in 1989, after the army’s suppression of demonstrations in Beijing and elsewhere. The Party itself suffered an existential crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in 1992, an event that resonates to this day in the corridors of power in Beijing. After each catastrophe, the Party has picked itself off the ground, reconstituted its armor and reinforced its flanks. Somehow, it has outlasted, outsmarted, outperformed or simply outlawed its critics.

Few events symbolized the advance of China and the retreat of the West during the financial crisis more than the touchdown in Beijing of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2009. Previous U.S. administrations, under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, had arrived in office with an aggressive, competitive posture towards China. Before she landed, Ms. Clinton publicly downplayed the importance of human rights. At a press conference before leaving, she beamingly implored the Chinese government to keep buying U.S. debt, like a traveling saleswoman hawking a bill of goods.

Deng Xiaoping’s crafty stratagem, laid down two decades earlier, about how China should advance stealthily into the world—”hide your brightness; bide your time”—had been honored in the breach long before Ms. Clinton’s arrival. China’s high-profile tours through Africa, South America and Australia in search of resources, the billion-dollar listings of its state companies (including PetroChina and the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China) on overseas stock markets, its rising profile in the United Nations and its sheer economic firepower had made China the new focus of global business and finance since the turn of the century. China’s star was shining more brightly than ever before, even as its diplomats protested they were battling to be heard on behalf of a relatively poor, developing economy.

The implosion of the Western financial system, along with an evaporation of confidence in the U.S., Europe and Japan, overnight pushed China’s global standing several notches higher. In the space of a few months in early 2009, the Chinese state committed $50 billion in extra funding for the International Monetary Fund and $38 billion with Hong Kong for an Asian monetary fund; extended a $25 billion loan to cash-strapped Russian oil companies; set aside $30 billion for Australian resource companies; offered tens of billions more to various countries or companies in South America, central and Southeast Asia, to lock up commodities and lay down its marker for future purchases. In September, China readied lines of credit of up to $60 to $70 billion for resource and infrastructure deals in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.

Beijing’s ambition and clout were being lit up in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years previously. The Chinese central bank called for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency in early 2009, and reiterated its policy as the year went on. France obediently recommitted to Chinese sovereignty over Tibet to placate Beijing’s anger over the issue, after Beijing had canceled an E.U. summit in protest at Paris’s welcome for the Dalai Lama. On its navy’s 60th anniversary, China invited the world to view its new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines off the port of Qingdao.

The giant Chinese market had become more important than ever. Just ahead of the Shanghai auto show in April 2009, monthly passenger car sales in China were the highest of any market in the world, surpassing the U.S. A month later, Wang Qishan and a team of Chinese ministers met Catherine Ashton, then the E.U. trade commissioner, and about 15 of Europe’s most senior business executives in Brussels to hear their complaints about Chinese market access. Sure, Mr. Wang conceded after listening to their problems over a working lunch, there are “irregularities” in the market. “I know you have complaints,” he replied. “But the charm of the Chinese market is irresistible.” In other words, according to astonished executives in the meeting, whatever your complaints, the market is so big, you are going to come anyway. Even worse, many of the executives realized that Mr. Wang was right.

The rise of China is a genuine mega-trend, a phenomenon with the ability to remake the world economy, sector by sector. That it is presided over by a communist party makes it even more jarring for a Western world which, only a few years previously, was feasting on notions of the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy.

In just a single generation, the party elite has been transformed from a mirthless band of Mao-suited, ideological thugs to a wealthy, business-friendly ruling class. Today’s Party is all about joining the highways of globalization, which in turn translates into greater economic efficiencies, higher rates of return and greater political security.

In the absence of democratic elections and open debate, it is impossible to judge popular support for the Party. But it is indisputable that support for the Party has grown with reform since Mao’s death. The Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the West when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks like their wishes will all come true.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1

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