Amid the ongoing debate on escalating the war in Afghanistan come warnings of what will happen should the US not wage the war successfully.  Among these warnings are: the Taliban will re-conquer the country; al Qaeda will regain the freedom of movement and training camps it had prior to 2001; and terrorism will spread more rapidly throughout the world.  None of this is likely and that must be made clear to policy makers and the American public.   

Insurgent Forces in Crisis

Many if not most of the fighters operating against US and NATO forces are not motivated by lofty ideals, religious fervor, or geopolitics.  They are not seeking to reestablish a caliphate or even to establish an Islamist heartland in Central Asia.  They seek, paradoxically enough to westerners who see themselves as avatars of impartial development, to oust foreign forces from their country whom they believe to be trying to dominate it in alliance with northern, non-Pashtun people.  

It is a testament to the strength of our commitment to democracy that we Americans believe elections will solve the problems of a country – any country. This is a nice civics lesson but the lessons of history are otherwise. And it is not a sound principle of foreign policy. Elections in Afghanistan are unlikely to solve the country’s problems; they may even worsen things. In any event, other political processes are more important – we just haven’t realized it yet.

President Hamid Karzai, amid numerous allegations of fraud in August’s elections, has accepted a second-round runoff with Abdullah Abdullah. Domestic pressure for a second round was significant but it was pressure from the US and western bodies that forced Karzai to accede. Coming amid the Obama administration's debate on sending more troops, one might suspect a deal: Karzai sits for a second election in exchange for more US troops. Any such deal would be a bad one. Escalation should be assessed on its own merits, not on short-term gain. Furthermore, a deal paves the way for more deals: additional troop increases in exchange for what the Afghan government should be doing anyway – acting responsibly.

The US and NATO have begun an ambitious counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan that places great importance on winning the support of the Afghan people. But there is a rarely-considered corollary in the counterinsurgency effort: Afghanistan must win the support of western publics. Thus far, Afghan politicians and officials and other power holders have been steadily losing western hearts and minds. The Afghans may soon face the withdrawal of western forces.

Support for the war has sagged badly in the United States, where military ventures are more admired than they are in Europe. Since last May, support for the war has fallen from fifty percent to thirty-nine percent; opposition has risen from forty-eight percent to fifty-eight percent. Eight percent of recent respondents thought the war was showing progress; twenty-six percent thought it was getting worse. Twenty-nine percent support sending more US troops; twenty-seven percent thought troop levels should remain the same and thirty-two percent favored decreasing troop levels.

A critical debate is underway to determine whether or not the US will send up to forty thousand more troops to Afghanistan. The debate is said to include a wide-range of opinion, but even at the top political and military levels, there isn’t profound understanding of insurgencies in general or the particular dynamics of the Afghan one.

The Afghan insurgency, we are repeatedly told, is based on intimidation and violence. This is true in parts of the country, but dubious in others. Indeed, seeing any insurgency as resting mainly on force is wrong and it will lead to wrong responses. Insurgencies develop when a non-government group builds rapport with at least parts of the populace. This was the case in Malaya, the Philippines, Algeria, and South Vietnam. And it is the case in Afghanistan.

In a surprise move, the administration today named Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder to head up the war effort in Afghanistan. The former advertising moghul and renaissance man will assume full control immediately. He held a rare press conference in Ashburn, Virginia.

“With my Redskins on the way to victory I can give something back to my country by leading it to victory, too. Managerial skills are all the same,” Snyder insisted. “If you can run a successful telemarketing business like I did, you can win a war – it’s not that hard. And I’m going to do to Afghanistan what I’ve done to the Redskins.” The boisterous sports aficionados fell silent. They knew he could do it.

It’s been a year now since the collapse of the financial system, when venerable institutions crumbled and the world fell toward depression. Historically, economic calamities have ushered in political and economic changes, often jarring ones – some for the better, others not. The present calamity seems to be heading us for a raw deal of a smaller and more deeply entrenched oligarchy.

A year ago, the financial sector was already concentrated. The previous decade or so had seen Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, and a handful of others, devour rivals. Presidents and congresses of both parties put aside longstanding bipartisan concerns over concentrated economic power, and simply looked on at centralization. Why would they do otherwise? Generous inducements were coming into the re-election coffers of both parties, and that certainly transcends statesmanship and foresight. It was a good time to be on Capitol Hill back then. It was an even better time to be on Wall Street.

Hamid Karzai is well on his way to winning over fifty percent of the vote, guaranteeing him a second term as president of Afghanistan. Though captious rivals are crying foul, several prominent Americans gave the elections a hearty thumbs-up at a recent gathering in a posh Kabul bunker.

Katherine Harris began the evening by certifying the election. “Everything was on the up-and-up,” she announced as she stood next to President Harzai. “It was as fair and honest as any election we’ve had in Florida!” she exclaimed pridefully. When asked why Patrick Buchanan had done so well in several districts of Paktia and Wardak, she replied, “Irish candidates always do well there.”

While watching the president’s address to congress last week, a startling revelation hit me. It wasn’t the sharp divisiveness, echoic though it was of a congress in, say, 1860. Nor was it that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi wore similar red outfits. That could be settled in the Burr-Hamilton tradition. Nor was it that Joe Wilson behaved like a boozy hockey fan angered by a high-sticking call. I was aghast at the number of toupées I saw in the members of congress.

It wasn’t half, a third, or even a quarter. But the occasional camera sweep of the crowd showed more than a few men with an ungainly clump of someone else’s hair sitting ungraciously atop an obviously barren pate.

The September 11th attacks led to various responses in the American public, shock and outrage the most immediate. Subsequent polling data showed another response. Trust in government rose sharply and immediately – a curious phenomenon, for 9/11 could be readily seen as resulting from colossal government failures. The eighth anniversary should be a time of solemn remembrance, but not of unreflective support. It should be a time of assessing the ensuing wars and the competence of national security institutions.

Military
Initial campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq were truly remarkable and will be benchmarks for future conventional operations. Special forces and airpower worked alongside Northern Alliance fighters to drive out Taliban and al Qaeda troops in short order. In early 2003, the military plunged into Iraq and seized Baghdad in a manner that astonished all.

Conservative attacks on President Obama and his agenda are fierce and seemingly everywhere, especially on talk radio. The president’s healthcare program is alleged to contain provisions for government bureaus to decide who lives and who dies. His fiscal policies are said to have created or at least profoundly worsened the economic situation. Claims are leveled that the national debt is mainly his responsibility. And of course we are on the brink of fascism – their word, not my exaggeration. I just spell it right for them.

In recent elections the GOP has lost both Houses and the White House, and hysteria has set in. Facing marginality, it’s launched attacks that are loud, boorish, and often with little if any basis in reality. The GOP emerged from the ashes of the Whig party; it may be on the same path to self-immolation. Ordinarily something heading for self-destruction should be left alone, but the GOP is damaging the nation as well.

Elections took place in Afghanistan last week amid a spate of Taliban violence and a dearth of public optimism. Few observers in or out of the country expect meaningful change to come, whether Mr Karzai or Mr Abdullah or another wins. The results might not be known for months, but clearly someone must find a way to govern the country. Failure would be disastrous for Afghanistan.

In the almost eight years since the Taliban was driven from the country, politicians, warlords, and tribal elders have failed to build any semblance of national government. President Karzai’s efforts have aimed mainly at securing his personal power, which alienated many tribes in the South and built sympathy for the Taliban. Corruption dominates most spheres of life, including the police and army, which are known to make separate peaces with the Taliban.

A review of Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, we were inundated by hysterical books which purported to give serious analysis of al Qaeda but which instead only added to our confusion – and also to our injudicious responses ever since. Leaderless Jihad was not published until well after the attacks and that is one of the reasons it is perhaps the most thoughtful book on al Qaeda and the social movement associated with it.

Though a psychiatrist, Sageman rejects a psychological approach to understanding terrorists. (A sign of an independent mind, this.) After going through his database of jihadists, he finds no personalty type or traumatic event that makes people heed the call to jihad. Nor does he see social context such as poverty to be helpful. Any such context is hopelessly vague and cannot explain why so many millions of people living in that context do not become terrorists.

Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), reportedly has been killed by a US drone strike in S. Waziristan. Aides have claimed he is not dead, but a more recent claim that he is “gravely ill” is probably backtracking and foreshadowing an announcement of his death, doubtless due to natural causes so as to admit no success for the United States and Pakistan – the latter privately supportive of the drone attacks. Mehsud’s death is certainly in some sense a victory for the US and Pakistan, but unfolding dynamics, unclear though they presently are, may not be entirely beneficial to the US.

The recent campaign in Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan, is the first phase of a far-reaching counterinsurgency program. Western and Afghan troops will clear Taliban fighters from villages and later whole districts, then begin a seemingly simple but actually arduous process of building local military/intelligence forces and delivering medical, construction, and veterinary services to the villages. The process is intended to be repeated in other parts of the country, mainly the South and East. Many think the difficult program will require still more troops.

Troop Requirements

Anyone expecting a repeat of the rancorous Bork or Thomas hearings last week was sorely disappointed.  That’s fine. Life has enough rancor. Unfortunately, anyone who wanted discussion of pressing constitutional matters was disappointed, too.  The usual questions came up to Judge Sotomayor, if only briefly and obliquely, but two serious constitutional matters went undiscussed in the five days of hearings: the constitutionality of present-day campaign financing and the decline of liberties at the hands of the national security state. 

The Court has recognized giving money to politicians as a form of speech.  But how did giving money to elected officials, putatively acting in the public interest, become a protected act akin to vowing to defend the nation or pledging allegiance to the flag?  Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that a whole lot of money has traded hands to make it so.  I wonder why the legal team arguing against the Bribe = Free Speech idea before the Court wasn’t able to offer at least five of the justices sizeable cash rewards and a set of steak knives for reaching an amenable and of course eminently judicious decision. Nine knives in that set sounds right . . . but five is all you really need.

There used to be a Peoples Drug Store a few blocks from where I grew up in Maryland. My witty father used to say that the store sounded like it was in downtown Moscow. He said the same thing about State Farm Insurance – surely an offshoot of Stalin’s collectivization program. Enough on dad’s humor. This is about the old business model, the new one, and an important part of how we got in the economic mess we’re in.

I used to remember the name of the manager of the Peoples at Colesville and University. He’d been there so long he was part of the shopping center, like Michael the jeweler or Larry the five & ten moghul, and his name was engraved, next to a pestle and mortar, on a plate in the front window. But the file containing his name has been deleted from my brain drive. He was an older man, sixty or so, and he conveyed expertise and commanded respect. Twenty-five years or more as a pharmacist taking care of the people in the neighborhood did that.

Last week US forces launched an offensive in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. The four thousand troops involved, mostly marines, are beginning one of the largest operations of the war and the start of a new chapter in the conflict as well.

The goals are ambitious. The campaign first seeks to drive the Taliban out of villages then begin a counterinsurgency program – providing services to the local population to win them over to the government side. Officers are ordered to meet with local councils within forty-eight hours of arrival and impress upon them the US’s commitment there.

The new approach to fighting the Taliban calls for building up local Afghan forces – militias and tribal levies. While this is a welcome departure from the neglect and reliance on massive firepower of past years, the approach will face many obstacles.

Local forces, from the Soviet occupation to the present, have not worked well with the Afghan national army. Preferring to remain in their districts, many Afghans choose service in local militaries, presenting personnel problems for the army. Militias are resented for draining military resources better allocated, in the army’s view, to them. Attempts over the years to amalgamate militias and army have met with failure.

We may never know the true vote count in the recent elections and it’s almost irrelevant now. Debate has ended, sides have been drawn, and a test of power, not votes, is underway. Over the last two days, in the face of serious yet restrained repression, street demonstrations are weakening. Relying largely on students and other young people, the opposition has only limited political potential. Maintaining support from military/paramilitary organizations and from important demographic groups, hardline clerics are still in control.

The opposition has not been successful in mobilizing broad support – nothing on the order of what ousted the shah in 1979. Middle-class participation today is in evidence, though limited in numbers and enthusiasm. The urban poor were important in the driving out the shah, but today they are more sympathetic to traditionalist appeals by Ahmadinejad and the clerics. For a decade or more before 1979, the urban poor had found affinities and social support in Islamic study circles, which led them into the massive street demonstrations that ushered in Khomeini’s return. In recent years Ahmadinejad has played to them with flamboyant speeches and generous expenditures – as he did with rural dwellers, who in any event are far from the centers of recent political action in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and other cities.

Iran has a perplexing form of government. There are elections – contested ones with candid debate, as this year’s campaign showed – which allow the public to register its views. On the other hand, candidates can be excluded from the ballot and the president’s actions are circumscribed. Above the ballot and the presidency loom a Guardian Council and Supreme Leader. Neither name betokens commitment to democracy and many people feel last Friday’s election was fixed.

The 2009 election had several candidates but only two, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were seen as having any chance of winning. The results show Ahmadinejad trouncing Mousavi, 63% to 34%, and this has led to charges of fraud in and out of Iran. Polling data are invoked that showed Mousavi ahead, sometimes by a wide margin, though sometimes by a nose. But many polls showed Ahmadinejad with a wide lead.

Three demographic groups contend in the political system and on the cultural landscape. The generation that came of age during World War Two, now in its late years, controlled the presidency and much of public life, from John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 until George Bush, Sr’s defeat in 1992 – a thirty-two year run. The baby boomers, thus far, have enjoyed a much shorter period – only sixteen years, from Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 until Barack Obama’s last year.

Despite their numbers and a cultural hegemony that would have put off Antonio Gramsci, the baby boomers are beginning to be pushed aside. They are not as geriatric as the WW2 generation – after all, they eat low-carb foods and work out occasionally – but they command much less respect. Obama (b. 1961, after the baby boom according to most demographers) outclassed a handful of boomers in the primaries and in the election overwhelmed the seventy-two-year-old John McCain, who was neither WW2 nor baby boomer but who might better fall in the latter category owing to his service in Southeast Asia.

In February the government of Pakistan and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) came to an agreement whereby the government accepted the latter’s imposition of Islamic law in parts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in exchange for a ceasefire. Few thought the agreement would last long and indeed it soon fell apart – because of government support for US Predator strikes, according to TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud. This raises new questions about the future of Pakistan and US/NATO operations in Afghanistan.

On announcing the end of the agreement, Mehsud sent his bands south, toward the political and military centers of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. In so doing, he let passion override strategy and badly damaged the TTP cause. Their thrust into the Punjab heartland accomplished what has only rarely and ephemerally happened in Pakistan: agreement between civilian and military leadership. The rancorous politicians and generals saw the sortie as a challenge to the existence of Pakistan, and struck back.

American politics is like a book. Usually our players are too plodding to give us a taut political thriller. We’ve had a cheap western and a charlatan romance in recent times. Our intelligence personnel are too witless for a decent espionage story. But foreshadowing there is and I think I’ve seen some lately in the fantasy novel of the American fiscal system that we all began a few decades ago.

The administration’s stimulus package is pumping huge amounts of money into the economy in the hope of countering the economic decline that began last year. While the stimulus is likely to have the desired counter-cyclical effect, the amount of borrowing it requires is likely to present serious problems in a year or so as the debt both parties have racked up over the decades reaches crisis levels. The amount of money in the federal budget dedicated to paying off the debt will soar and creditors will think twice about further lending. They might even put the book down.

A spate of bombings in Iraq has given rise in recent weeks to asking how long US troops must remain in the country. Al Qaeda was thought to be all but eliminated from the Sunni Arab provinces and barely holding on to redoubts in the northern Kurdish provinces. But al Qaeda’s recent bombing campaign has caused some to ask if the US will be able withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011. That’s the wrong question.

Many forces are pressing for the US to remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities, fearful of the Shi’a majority, want protectors and may be able to revise the withdrawal timetable established in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement. Israel and Saudi Arabia see eye to eye on few things but fear of Iran (and perhaps an inordinate fear) is one such thing. Both will use their considerable influence in Washington to keep US troops there as a buffer against Shi’a expansion. The US military, having adopted a “see it through” ideology in the wake of Vietnam (distant though that memory now is), also wants to maintain a presence in Iraq until a stable government is established, though no one can say just when that will be.

Since counterinsurgency was first bandied about in US bureaus and agencies in the early sixties, the idea has been associated with western ideas of economic development and modernization – dissolving a backward traditional society and building a vigorous modern one. In the mind of many American policy makers, it is their nation’s mission in the world to help this process along, inevitable though they believe it to be.

Western and Afghani bureaus must abandon this idea, as sweeping change will be opposed in tribal areas and elsewhere too. In the late seventies the Afghan government embarked on a reform program of redistributing land, bringing education to the villages, and increasing the state’s presence throughout the country to carry through reform – a program that will not strike many outsiders as problematic, resonant as it is with American aid plans dating back to the sixties. The reforms led to opposition and later to open revolt in almost every quarter of the country, which in turn triggered the Soviet intervention and an agonizing war.