makes my brain hurt. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. :)

Americans have decided that we are in a hole, and that means to dig faster.

the biggest snag is the same thing that usually puts an end to schemes of western intervention (since Alexander). The risk of a collapsible supply chain is finally going to bring things to a head in Afghanistan.

One theory worth considering is that the Mumbai attacks were a joint operation of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the vast criminal network of Dawood Ibrahim (and additionally the hardline Hindu zealots in Indian intelligence let it happen on purpose too).

Ibrahim's network was a critical part of the CIA's effort to maintain control over Pakistan, netting such characters as Khalid Sheik Muhammed and securing the US military's shipping container operations. (I believe the new prime minister owns the trucking company?) Ibrahim may have gotten sold out by the Pakistanis and the CIA, and thus decided to go mess with everyone's plans in Mumbai.

He has also abandoned the US military supply chain to the tender mercies of the militants all over the northwestern quadrant. The depots have been severely attacked and further stuff along these lines is most likely in 2009.

Or I could be wrong, certainly, but it seems that angles like this are in the works.
--
Hongpong.com

why I am becoming disenchanted with Obama. (1) He seems to have bought into the notion that we need to ramp up the war in Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban; (2) he keeps using the phrase "America has to lead once again"; (3) he keeps using the phrase "we need to grow the economy". I'm afraid he doesn't get it. These are mistaken beliefs, IMO.

(via Frontline [India])

Drift will end

VIJAY PRASHAD

The Obama team wants to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy.

“Don’t try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire! Don’t wash a wound with blood!”

– Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century

ON January 13, 2009, Senator John Kerry, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, leaned into his microphone and said of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, “I think we’re on the wrong track.” A former presidential candidate who not only served in Vietnam but also became one of that war’s most powerful critics, Kerry now cautioned, “Unless we rethink [the Afghan policy] very, very carefully, we could raise the stakes, investing America’s reputation in a greater way as well as our treasure, and wind up pursuing a policy that is frankly unachievable.”

Sitting before Kerry’s committee, Senator Hillary Clinton, who was later confirmed as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, said, “I think that your cautions are extremely well taken.” The Afghan policy was not to be taken lightly. It was going to be thoroughly reconsidered. The U.S. does not have “a set of discrete goals”. This is what has to be clarified. “My awareness of the history going back to Alexander the Great, certainly the imperial British military, and Rudyard Kipling’s memorable poems about Afghanistan, the Soviet Union which put in more troops than we’re thinking about putting in – I mean, it calls for a large dose of humility about what it is we are trying to accomplish,” she said.

No longer the brave statements about “getting Bin Laden”, of installing a liberal democracy, of freeing women, of ridding the region of the Taliban. Realism is the order of the day. Currently, there are 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with an additional detachment of 8,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops (from 47 countries). During his election campaign, Obama promised to double the U.S. number, and to make Afghanistan the “central front on terror”. By all indications, the troops will arrive in Kabul by mid-March. What they will do is another question.
...
In March 2008, the Atlantic Council, a major policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., released a report entitled “Saving Afghanistan: An Appeal and Plan for Urgent Action”. The co-author of the report was Major General (retired) James L. Jones, who commanded NATO’s European forces from 2003 to 2006. The first line of the report is blunt: “Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”

The Taliban and the NATO-U.S. forces are at a military stalemate, the report admits. An increase in the NATO-U.S. troops will allow them to take the fight against the Taliban to the less populated, largely rural areas. But this is simply not going to end the conflict. The future of Afghanistan is not going to be fought in its countryside but it will be “determined by progress or failure in the civil sector”.

The NATO-U.S. effort fails in this aspect. The funds for civil development are limited, and even here, “to add insult to injury, of every dollar of aid spent on Afghanistan, less than 10 per cent goes directly to Afghans”. The NGO (non-governmental organisation) economy is top-heavy, catering to international aid brokers who have inflamed Kabul’s housing market. In addition, the Atlantic Council, in a remarkable departure from the George Bush policy, called for “a regional approach and regional solutions”.

The NATO-U.S. alliance and the Hamid Karzai government need to bring “in interested parties and neighbours”, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (which includes the Central Asian states, China and Russia), India, Iran and, of course, Pakistan. None of this can be done without a comprehensive reconsideration of U.S.-NATO strategy in Afghanistan.
...
Shortly after the Atlantic Council made its report, the Bush White House created its own review of Afghan policy.Lt. General Douglas Lute, the White House’s “war czar”, headed the review, which reported back to Bush in December 2008. Lute laid out three proposals: (1) that aid to Pakistan should be conditional on its commitment to the battle in the border regions of Afghanistan; (2) that the U.S. government must take a regional view, including India, Pakistan and other states into the discussion on insurgency; (3) that the U.S. government must broaden its strategy to emphasise development and governance rather than military power.This was an in-house rebuke of the Bush policy. It went largely unnoticed.
(NB: "War tzar Lute" maintains his position at the NSC in the Obama administration, and is on track for reporting yet another policy review on the Afghanistan situation; he will report through James Jones rather than directly to the President, apparently)
...
For several months, Admiral Mullen has complained that the U.S. military cannot do the job alone. It has been reduced to the cities and bases, with occasional forays into the countryside (mainly from the air). The isolation of the U.S.-NATO soldiers, despite the attempt to reach out to ordinary Afghans through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, has come to resemble the Red Army’s isolation in the last years before it exited the country. Russia’s Ambassador to Kabul, Zamir Kabulov, was once the KGB’s man there, and now points out that the U.S. has not only copied all the Soviet errors but made some of its own. At least, he said, the Soviets had a modernisation strategy, spending billions in the 1980s on education, women’s empowerment and infrastructure. “Where, I ask, are the big American projects to match these,” he told The New York Times’ John Burns in October 2008. “I’ll tell you. There aren’t any.”
...
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army continues to build military infrastructure across Afghanistan. Military training centres, new airfields, and bases: all these amount to hardware that belies the idea that the military aspect will be whittled down.

The Washington Post (January 13) reports that the U.S. might end up spending an additional $4 billion to build these military outposts, which of course “signals a long-term U.S. military commitment at a time when the incoming Obama administration’s policy for the Afghan war is unclear”. If the new Obama policy is not crystal clear, the new military hardware will begin to drive the strategy on the ground.
...
To speak of Kipling and Alexander and not of Mahmud Tarzi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, of Anahita Ratebzad and Malalai Joya is to indicate a preference for Afghanistan’s imperial history to its history of reform and freedom. This failure to see the country from Afghan eyes is going to make any review Americo-centric.

The Obama administration will certainly send in more troops, and in April it will possibly reveal its new strategy at the NATO summit in France.

Between now and then, perhaps Hillary Clinton and Obama will digest the lesson of the Atlantic Council, of people such as Amy Frumin, and of a wounded President Hamid Karzai.

http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20090213260306100.htm

It's certainly not the case that Obama is only hearing one side - the military view - on a breakout strategy for Aghanistan and South Asian policy as a whole. Not only from foreign-based observers but from "progressives" in the US, as detailed here by Spencer Ackerman:

Progressives Launch Attack on Afghanistan
Group of Liberals Question Ramping Up Forces
http://washingtonindependent.com/27073/progressives-on-afghanistan

Barack Obama prides himself on hearing countervailing opinions, a robust give-and-take process before making a decision; if there is any one early decision he must make that will have enormous significance for his administration going forward, Afghanistan (and Pakistan) clearly stand out.

(cross-posted on Iraq and Afghanistan Dual Fronts thread)

Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

Salon.com, By Juan Cole, January 26

On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?

Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there.

The tribal notable Khalil Dawar, who lived near the village of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, hosted a party of five alleged al-Qaida operatives in the guesthouse on his property. An American drone hit the site with three Hellfire missiles. According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money.

The big question now is whether Pakistan is a failed state (with nuclear weapons). It has all the earmarks of one. This is a big deal.

...policy is disheartening. I had hoped for a more intelligent review and change in direction. As so many intelligent and informed scholars have said; there is no military solution in Afghanistan.

Pakistan says has no deal with U.S. on drone strikes
Wed Jan 28, 2009 6:52am EST

By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan said Wednesday it wanted closer cooperation with the United States in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban but had no understanding with Washington that allowed missile strikes on its territory.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that Washington would continue with strikes by unmanned Predator drones against militants and that Pakistan was aware of this.

But in a statement Wednesday, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry denied there was a deal.

"There is no understanding between Pakistan and the United States on Predator attacks," spokesman Mohammad Sadiq said.

The United States, frustrated by an intensifying Afghan insurgency and what it sees as Pakistan's reluctance to tackle the spillover, stepped up the missile attacks last year.

The Washington Post in November cited unidentified Pakistani and U.S. officials as saying the countries had agreed on a don't-ask-don't-tell policy that allowed attacks, but Islamabad formally denied such an agreement.

U.S. officials normally decline to comment publicly on reports of missile strikes but Gates made an exception on Tuesday when asked about Pakistan's complaints at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

PURSUE AL QAEDA

"Both President Bush and President Obama have made clear that we will go after al Qaeda wherever al Qaeda is and we will continue to pursue that," Gates said.

Asked by committee chairman Senator Carl Levin if that decision had been conveyed to the Pakistani government, Gates replied: "Yes, sir."

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