Mikhail Sergeyevich applies the idiomatic phrase “…… vydelyvnet Krendelya” to Karmal. We could use it do describe Karzai, Obama, Clinton, McChrystal, et. al.. It translates literally as “….. is walking like a pretzel.” The figurative meaning is that someone is staggering and weaving like a drunk; that is, not being straight-forward.

The Soviets had the exact same problem with Afghan government legitimacy that the US is having now. They had the same problem with the Pakistan-Afghan border land that we have now. They had a better Afghan Army to work with and still had the problems we’re having. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and in this case we’re merely looking at history translated from Russian to English.

Early in the proceedings on 13 November 1986, Gorbachev says to the Politburo:

“We have been fighting in Afghanistan for already six years. If the approach is not changed, we will continue to fight for another 20-30 years. This would cast a shadow on our abilities to affect the evolution of the situation. Our military should be told that they are learning badly from this war. … In general we have not selected the keys to resolving this problem. What, are we going to fight endlessly, as a testimony that our troops are not able to deal with the situation? We need to finish this as soon as possible.”

President Obama is, of course, dealing with the most insubordinate cadre of generals since MacArthur went and lost the Korean War. They are hoping for another 20-30 years to continue learning badly–and attempting to wash out the stain of Vietnam by repeating the same mistakes. Obama could fire the lot of them, but he won’t. The question remains to what extent they will influence the decision making process towards their own, institutional ends. That is the operative process for the DoD here; fighting terrorism or stabilizing Afghanistan is of no concern to Petraeus, McChrystal, etc., they’re concerned with their budgets and their glory. The fate of the nation comes in somewhere well below personal and institutional ambition.

A.A. Gromyko points out, “Too long ago we spoke on the fact that it is necessary to close off the border of Afghanistan with Pakistan and Iran. Experience has shown that we are unable to do this in view of the difficult terrain of the area and the existence of hundreds of passes in the mountains.” My goodness does that sound familiar. The Soviets, of course, could not pressure Pakistan to apply military force to its side of the Durand Line, but it makes little difference. The last eight years have shown the situation to be like applying pressure to a water balloon: press the Afghan side and the insurgents squirt to Pakistan, press the Pakistan side and the insurgents move back to Afghanistan. It is, in effect, the same problem with different uniforms involved.

Gorbachev is clearly thinking about ending the war by this politburo session (in a maximum of two years), much like the D.C. leak-fest is suggesting that Obama wants exit strategies. But the Soviets spend a fair amount of time discussing the problems they have with domestic politics in Afghanistan. Gromyko says, “In the Afghan Army the number of conscripts equals the number of deserters.” And the politburo must contend with distancing itself from Karmal without completely undermining the relationship. “It is also necessary to keep him [Karmal] on the general track; to cut him off would not be the best scenario. It is more expedient to preserve [his relations] with us.”

Domestic politics in Afghanistan are clearly bleeding into wider political questions. “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” If the reader would like to question American motives, he should refer to the statement of Ishmael Khan [a familiar name in current events], “The Americans want us to continue fighting but not to win, just to bleed the Russians.” Today there is no clear cut support for the Afghan insurgency against the US, but that doesn’t mean that regional players are not happy to see the insurgency bleed the United States as the mujaheddin bled the Soviets.

At this point, the politburo discusses involving regional players like India and puts a political settlement to the Afghan conflict at the top of its list. “In one word, it is necessary to more actively pursue a political settlement. Our people will breathe a deep sigh if we undertake steps in that direction.” My best guess is that there was hope in the administration that the Afghan elections would open the door for such a political settlement; to the same end we hear rumors of talks with the Taliban.

Shevardnadze, “Right now we are reaping the fruit of our un-thought-out decisions of the past.” And indeed, history does sometimes repeat itself with alarming precision. The Soviets were in a damned if we do/damned if we don’t situation by the middle of November 1986. We find ourselves in the same situation. Shevardnadze continues, “It is necessary to state precisely the period of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. You, Mikhail Serge’evich, said it correctly – two years. But neither our, nor Afghan comrades have mastered the questions of the functioning of the government without our troops.”

Akhromeyev (deputy minister of defense):

Military action in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels. … There is no single military problem that has arisen and that has not been solved, and yet there is still no result. The whole problem is the fact that military results are not followed up by political [actions]. At the center is authority; in the provinces there is not. We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. The government is supported by a minority of the population. Our army has fought for five years. It is now in a position to maintain the situation on the level that it exists now. But under such conditions the war will continue for a long time.

If the similarities between then and now, the USSR and the USA, weren’t frightening enough already, they get worse. The Politburo continues its discussion and moves into the situation of the Afghans as a population. Vorontsov, “Afghanistan is a peasant country (80 percent of the population are peasants). But it is exactly they who have least benefited from the revolution. Over eight years of the revolution agricultural production has increased by only 7 percent, and the standard of living peasants remains at pre-revolutionary levels.” He then quotes comrade Zeray, “because of various reasons, the status of the peasants in the government zone is in certain ways worse than in regions of counter-revolutionary activity.”

That’s how a large power loses a counter-insurgency in an undeveloped nation, and that’s how the US is losing the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Being under the control of the occupier has little or no benefit to the population. Being under the control of the established central government is often worse than being under the control of the insurgency.

Gorbachev sums up the meeting:

“In October of last year [1985] in a Politburo meeting we determined upon a course of settling the Afghan question. The goal which we raised was to expedite the withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan and simultaneously ensure a friendly Afghanistan for us. It was projected that this should be realized through a combination of military and political measures. But there is no movement in either of these directions. The strengthening of the military position of the Afghan government has not taken place. National consolidation has not been ensured mainly because comrade Karmal continued to hope to sit in Kabul under our assistance. It has also been said that we fettered the actions of the Afghan government.”

It seems that Obama’s first strategic review of Afghanistan took a similar shape to the Politburo’s 1985 decision, and roughly one year later the Obama administration finds itself in the same position as the Politburo’s 13 November 1986 meeting details. If there is any hope for the nation and the Obama administration, someone is brandishing the sheets of paper quoted above. The American experience in Afghanistan will be as fruitless and, ultimately, the same sort of failure as the Soviets experienced…for exactly the same reasons.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it is not hyperbole to suggest that the long-term fate of the United States will mirror that of the Soviet Union if our leadership does not head the lessons available. The USSR expended money and energy badly needed at home in Afghanistan; Afghanistan alone did not destroy that nation, but it was certainly one straw too many. The United States is not unbreakable, and the time for basing decisions on national myths is long passed.

Choose well, Mr. President. The fate of your nation may well rest with the decisions made today.

PDF of the Politburo meeting minutes

Further archival material here and here

According to the paper of sure we’ll lie to help you invade Iraq record, Mr. Karzai was paid for “a variety of services” that included raising a paramilitary force. You don’t say…

I’ll just go ahead, break with writing convention and give you the money shot way ahead of schedule:

“The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.”

Raise your hand if you’re surprised by that sentence.

Is your hand up? If it is, you’re an idiot.

The rest of the piece is pure, unadulterated agitprop…not that the majority of Homo americanus is quick enough on the uptake  to see through it. Oh, the Obama administration’s consternation and hand wringing that the brother Karzai might be a “malevolent force”. Lord, who could have guessed that throwing Benjamins at whoever made the best promises for the short term would blow up in our face?

Anyone who bothered to read anything deeper than the paper of evil Russia invades Georgia, the bastion of democracy, unprovoked record could have told this story anywhere between last week and eight years ago. Many of us did.

And none of you listened.

Congratulations, Mr. Obama, you’ve managed to push the Karzais into a corner. Got ‘em real flustered too. “I help, definitely,” Ahmed Karzai said, “I help other Americans wherever I can. That is my duty as an Afghan.” The poor guy doesn’t even know if he’s Afghan or American anymore.

But he’s not the only one’s who’s confused. We’ve got a Gen. Flynn who thinks that “the only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone.” (Whew, i’m sure glad there hasn’t been any mafia activity in Chicago since 1931.) And then the proverbial “unnamed CIA officer” who says, “Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you’re looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

Again, show of hands if you’re surprised by the anonymous CIA officer’s statement. Yes, you’re an idiot.

The question, the big fucking question, is how Mr. Obama plans to establish a squeaky-clean slate of hope in Afghanistan under these circumstances. It’s one thing to make your few “friends” walk the plank for your benefit; it’s a whole other thing to not open yourself up to accusations that you’re doing the same thing that the last jackass-in-chief did. I’m talking about the US government’s tangential–at the very least–involvement in the opium trade; i’m also talking about the blatantly timed leaks and obvious media manipulation.

We get it, Karzai is the scapegoat for all the horrendous bullshit that’s happened in Afghanistan and all the blood on the hands of Republicans, Democrats, Homo americanus ignoramus and the rest of us. So what? All it proves is that being an ally of the United States is at least as dangerous as being its enemy. Now show us the lily white savior of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

Look, i’m not a fan of big time drug dealers like the CIA Ahmed Wali Karzai or their abettors like the paper of record the CIA. But this is just asinine.

Hunter was right, “We’re a nation of pigs and we’ll get what we deserve.”

There’s no question that the election was rigged, but the low voter turnout is more dangerous to government legitimacy than the fraud. Just five years ago Afghanistan held an election that defied expectations: women voted in large numbers, old men cried after voting for the first time in their lives, polls had to stay open late so that all who wanted to vote could, and it was peaceful. In effect, we’ve been moving backwards.

Karzai appears to be the odd man out, or at least a convenient scapegoat. The failure that characterizes the mission to date is less about Karzai’s imperfection than about what passed for strategy during the Bush administration. Obama administration spokespeople are promoting the meme that we need a strong central government in Kabul for the mission to be successful. That’s true, and i’m glad to see that everyone read COIN for Dummies, but we’re leaving out significant issues that need to be considered and addressed. The Pentagon only discovered counter-insurgency a few years ago. It certainly wasn’t practiced in the early stages of the Afghan conflict. Our counter-insurgency strategy then went by the name of, publicly i might add, “The Warlord Strategy”.

Karzai’s government is weak and ineffectual because we spent those heady days leaving him to molder in Kabul while the CIA handed attaché cases full of cash to the warlords whose power we now bemoan. Reconstruction has been woefully underfunded. Plans have been mired in indecision and bureaucracies working at cross-purposes. Much of the money spent found its way back to donor countries through consultancies and contracting. It’s a functioning society that gives government legitimacy. Would you give a rip what the President says if you only had electricity every few days?

You can’t change history. You also can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. And you certainly can’t make it go away by chanting, “Bush’s fault, Bush’s fault.” We do, however, have to deal with the effects of that sordid history. The Afghan insurgency—religious, nationalist or tribal—is strong and gaining strength; that’s what insurgencies do in the vacuum created by weak government. It’s victory by default, because while a person may find Taliban justice horrifying, it is at least justice. When a weak government obviously leans on its foreign patron, the insurgency wins again. It is able to portray an already weak government as a puppet of the occupier. The deck is stacked against a foreign power occupying territory with an indigenous insurgency. If the insurgency has outside support or safe haven, then the game is rigged. This insurgency has both, which is why Pakistan is leveling South Waziristan. Whether Pakistan is genuinely attempting to address the insurgency issues on its side of the not-really-an-international-border border or not remains to be seen. It has a long history of playing multiple sides of the game, even when Pakistan is endangered.

The Obama administration made Hamid Karzai lose whatever honor he had left when it forced him to announce the run off. I believe in the sanctity of democracy, and i’m disgusted by the fraud. On the other hand, Afghanistan after more than 30 years of ceaseless conflict is no place to play political-science Pollyanna. Our chances of finding a leader who’s untouched by corruption and also powerful enough to demand loyalty in the present circumstances are roughly the same as there being a leprechaun guarding that leader at the end of a rainbow.

That leaves us with a short list of possible resolutions to the election issue. We can assume that turnout will be dismally low, and we can assume that there will be more fraud. In which case we can A. hide it; B. declare the election fraudulent and let Karzai rule without a constitutional mandate through (at least) the winter, which will surely be a boon to the perception of legitimacy; C. depose Karzai and put an unelected leader in his place; or D. scrap the Afghan-written constitution and put together something we think will work better. I don’t see a good one in the lot.

Galbraith’s noble whistle-blowing put the administration in a difficult position. That it made political hay out of the situation by publicly lecturing on democracy, subtly blaming the mission’s failure on Karzai’s weak government and not-so-subtly displaying the true power relationship in the Kabul election fraud press conference was its own decision. It didn’t have to do any of those things. The left is divided on Afghanistan in the first place, and it isn’t even paying attention. Now the administration is in a corner of its own painting in the midst of deciding how to proceed.

This is not the time to give the Pentagon a chance to prove that it really could have won in Vietnam. Doing this by the DoD’s book will require hundreds of thousands of troops and uncountable sums of money over a very long time span, and even with all that, failure is a real possibility. McChrystal’s 40,000 minimum is unlikely to turn the tide of this conflict, and the idea that the Afghan National Army will make up the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary is, at present and in the near-term, laughable. A piece-meal escalation of 15,000 here and 40,000 there might be easier to accomplish from a domestic politics perspective, but it won’t help—and may in fact hinder—the mission. Biden’s plan for a limited, counter-terrorism presence sounds good politically: protect the national security flank while mostly withdrawing from Afghanistan. But it will amount to the US being just one more militia on the Afghan landscape during a civil war.

Obama is in a difficult position. He’s been clear about his intent to stay in Afghanistan, so withdrawal means the dreaded flip-flop, a political opening for the Republican Party and having to stand up to his generals. The last is particularly problematic because he appointed them. Withdrawal has its consequences. The USGS found significant resources in Afghan territory: oil, gas and minerals. The Chinese have already developed a copper mine. These considerations may not make the front page, but rest assured that they’re being discussed behind closed doors.

There are no “good” or incredibly feasible solutions here. The US could drop its pretenses and behave like a real empire, but that’s unlikely and probably wouldn’t be successful anyhow. It can withdraw and leave the area to fester, which will be a massive victory for our supposed enemies and a loss of national honor that few politicians would be willing to risk. Or it can continue muddling through and leave the inevitable for future leaders at the cost of blood, treasure and regional stability.

The best option is, unfortunately, the least realistic. A massive international effort in peacekeeping, disarming Afghanistan and reconstruction combined with grand diplomacy that addresses regional issues is the only realistic possibility for accomplishing our purported goals in the region. There is no template for such an action. There may not be enough international trust to bring it to fruition. And Obama confronting the military to the degree necessary is unlikely, but more likely than him being able to commit the US to such a long-term project.

We can’t know if the deliberations are considering the long-term implications of policy direction. Given the nature of the US, there’s a good chance that decisions will be based more on institutional and political positioning for the short-term. Those long-term implications, however, are real and very dangerous. Remember that Gorbachev chose to escalate the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan when he became General Secretary; he was forced to withdraw later. His situation is instructive, as there are plenty of parallels between his USSR and the United States today. Wisdom is learning from other people’s experience. Should we choose to ignore history and follow Franklin’s maxim that experience is a dear school but a fool will learn in no other, we are likely to fulfill the “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” prophecy. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires because of any characteristics inherent in the nation. It just happens to be where falling empires go to die.

Mullah Omar is back with a vengeance, says a story on the front page of The NY Times that’s been echoed in red atop the Huffington Post. The latter patriotically reminds you to let the authorities know if you see a tall, male Afghan with black hair and a shrapnel wound to his right eye.

“This is an amazing story,” said Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who coordinated the Obama administration’s initial review of Afghanistan policy in the spring. “He’s a semiliterate individual who has met with no more than a handful of non-Muslims in his entire life. And he’s staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history.”

Whether or not Omar is the real brains behind the Taliban resurgence that has D.C. policy makers sweating remains to be determined, but it’s a gripping story that produces a nicely defined villain. It fits well with Secretary Clinton’s recent pronouncements concerning the attack-hostage situation-siege in Pakistan, reminding us “that extremists … are increasingly threatening the authority of the [Pakistani] state….” She also pointed out there is only “strong and clear” resolve in the fight against the Taliban; a fight that the US will work with the new Afghan government to win.

That would be the Afghan government that recently won an election we haven’t seen in many headlines. Thanks to Peter Galbraith, the UN was forced to announce that the election was marred by “widespread fraud“. And she forgot to mention the rumors of the Obama administration entertaining the possibility of allowing the Taliban a stake in governing Afghanistan. That would be unnamed official speak for “pretty much right back where we started from…minus a few hundred billion and stacks of dead bodies.”

There’s a lot to be considered when the mandarins spend this week beneath the Nobel sheen, deciding what to do next. General McChrystal will be arguing for at least 40,000 more boots on the ground. He needs them because “the overall situation is deteriorating” and “the insurgents currently have the initiative.” The doves (stop snickering), like my own Sen. Carl Levin, say that there are other ways to show our resolve.

More hawkish politicians point out that just training Afghans won’t cut it. We need to destroy the Taliban if we can ever hope to defeat Al Qaeda, and if we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan will surely fall to the sort of extremists that keep Sec. Clinton awake at night. And imagine if the Taliban give Al Qaeda sanctuary again; that would be a grave threat to our national security.

We could consider Mullah Omar’s statement in September: “We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others.” Mr. Riedel, the CIA officer quoted above, assures us that any such statement from Omar is just “clever propaganda.” Being one of the designers of the current Afghan strategy and a Langley fellow, he’d probably know.

And the Grey Lady would never lie to us *cough* Iraq *cough* Georgian War *cough*…excuse me, i seem to be having a coughing fit that might go on for some time.

Ahem. If you feel like you might be getting the run around South Asia, you’ll want to read Eric Margolis in The Toronto Sun:

Truth is war’s first casualty. The Afghan war’s biggest untruth is, “we’ve got to fight terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home.”

Many North Americans still buy this lie because they believe the 9/11 attacks came directly from the Afghanistan-based al-Qaida and Taliban movements.

False. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, and conducted mainly by U.S.-based Saudis to punish America for supporting Israel.

It’s well worth reading the whole article, because you are getting the run around. Margolis may not have it 100% correct, but he has less to gain by speaking the truth than men like Riedel and Levin have to lose from it.

We’re sinking in a pointless quagmire, begun on lies that our peace prize winner chooses to perpetuate. Do you really think that Obama will put a stop to it? Can you define victory in South Asia? The only question that remains is whether we’ll make it longer than the Soviets, since it’s pretty clear that the end will be the same.

Thanks to Ian Welsh for pointing out the Margolis piece.

Boys love to play war. Any guy who grew up before 1970 probably took part in innumerable skirmishes, doomed charges, and pitched battles. I fell in heroic fashion three times during the Battle of Tillman’s Apple Tree, a personal record. My deep fascination with playing war didn’t end until my third minute of boot camp.

But unlike the Union and Confederate forces at Gettysburg, we wouldn’t stage mock battles if the sun was too hot. We still played war, but in a more civilized fashion: with plastic army men.

There was a kid in our neighborhood named Mars Hill. Yes, I know how contrived that sounds, since we were going to play war, but Mars really was his name. I think it was short for Marshall, and he had every toy ever invented, including several thousand plastic army men. Tragically, Mars was kind of crazy, and he didn’t let anyone play with his stuff unless you were willing to play inside his house.

“Hey, Mars?” I asked one day. “Why don’t we take some of this stuff outside?”

“Why would I want to take anything outside?” he replied. “Stuff gets lost when you take it outside. Or broken. Or stolen. Are you gonna steal my stuff?”

“No. Not today, anyway. What if we took something outside that couldn’t be broken?” I said. “Like these plastic army men. They’re so cheap nobody would want to steal them. You can’t break them. And we’ll keep them in your back yard, so you won’t lose them and I won‘t be seen playing with them. I am 15, after all, so I don’t really want anybody to know I still play with toys.”

“What would we do with them?” Mars asked.

“What would we do with plastic army men? Play war, of course,” I said. Mars was kind of thick. “We’ll set them all up in two massive formations and let them fight it out.”

“They don’t move, so how can they fight?” asked Mars.

“I know they don’t move,” I replied. “Look, we’ll set them up and build bunkers and bridges and fox holes, then we’ll throw rocks at them. I’ll throw at your guys and you throw at mine. When a toy soldier gets knocked over, he’s out. You know, dead. Whoever has the last guy standing is the winner. What do you say?”

Mars hesitated. I had to convince him that a rock couldn’t really damage the plastic army men, but once I did, he reluctantly agreed to the contest. We gathered up bags of the army men, about 500 of them, including ten of the really big ones that were five inches tall. We split those up five to a side, then began two great construction projects, as battlements and twig fences were set up all across his back yard. My army was composed of green American GIs, gray Confederate troops, and bright red American Indians. I faced a formidable force of golden Japanese soldiers, blue Union cavalry, and 50 bright white revolutionary minutemen. After two hours of frantic construction, the aerial bombardment began.

The big plastic army men were the easiest targets, so they were the first to fall. There was a lesson in that, somewhere, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. We started by lobbing rocks that were the size of dimes, but an arms race soon overtook us, and the rocks got bigger and bigger, until a brick careened across the summer sky and landed on Mars’ bridge, putting and end to his immobile reinforcements. Custer’s men flew everywhere, brought down by Little Big Rock. Then a bowling ball destroyed my left flank.

The casualty count on both sides grew, but just when we thought the battle was won or lost, we would find a few stragglers leaning against a rock or stick. Then there were the reclining snipers, with their bellies hugging the ground. We decided those guys weren’t out of the battle until they were flipped onto their backs, and that was hard to do. Then things really began to get interesting. Mars produced some bottle rockets, and the grass soon caught fire. The scattered forms began to melt into pools of green and gray and blue. I could almost hear the screams. I counterattacked with a water assault, pulling the hose from the side of Mars’ house, and attacking the growing grass fire. All the tiny plastic soldiers were trapped between the elements.

At the end of the day, only two soldiers, both prone snipers, were left. I commanded one, and Mars the other. We considered calling the whole day a draw, but that seemed a disgrace to all the honorable dead on both sides. Some ancient belief rose up in us and refused to look away. No. I will not yield. Neither will he. Such a beautiful sacrifice deserves a winner. The gods demanded it. And so we took turns hurling a basketball at each of the survivors, until Mars struck my guy and flipped him onto his back. He had little time to gloat, however, because at that moment, his dad came around the corner pushing a mower that would destroy them all, the victor and the vanquished.

“That was fun,” said Mars.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Sorry about your army men, though. I think the mower will do what our rocks and stones couldn’t.”

“Aw, that’s all right,” said Mars. “I got hundreds more inside. Let’s do it again tomorrow. This can be the first battle of the Great Backyard War.”

As it turned out, that was the last battle of Great Backyard War. While the lawnmower, as purifying as time, rolled over the holy ground of our battlefield, the whirling blades shot all our ordinance and foot soldiers out the side and back. Bits of plastic and sharp stones made a furious bombardment, and we ran for cover, even as Mars’ dad, bleeding from both shins, screamed and jumped and yelled at us.

I had to make a strategic re-deployment when Mars’ dad took off his belt. It wasn’t his bleeding shins or the fall he took on the wet grass, but the sight of his bowling ball floating away that enraged him. From that day until he graduated, Mars kept the Hill Family lawnmower in his room with the rest of his toys.

It was just as well. And now, all these years later, as I watch my son deploy his toys for another imaginary assault on Castle Shoebox, I am filled with sorrow and fear for his future. He wants me to join him, but I refuse again, and I hear laughter as he plays. He doesn’t understand that when a guy reaches a certain age, playing war just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

Part 3…God’s own medicine

The Obama administration rescinded the Bush administration’s quixotic order to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. Judging by hectare cultivation numbers and harvest yields, the plan was either never fully implemented or failed miserably. At the very least, farmers in Afghanistan are no longer being punished for trying to make a living. Like Bush, the Obama administration wants to reform Afghan agriculture and move it away from poppy cultivation. Unfortunately, these plans are still “being finalized”. To understand the problems inherent in the administration’s plans and possible futures for Afghan agriculture we need to examine Afghanistan’s situation, the opium poppy, and the history of opium cultivation.

Papaver somniferum (the sleep bringing poppy) has a long history with humanity: seeds have been found in Neolithic burials and recorded use dates to c. 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. For most of those years it was not an evil scourge, but one of the most important plants in the human cornucopia. Gods were depicted wearing its flowers. It offered pain relief without equal in the ancient world, along with mystical visions. But its downside was noticed at least as early as Galen, who wrote that opium users developed a need for the substance and the negative effects of habituation.

As late as the U.S. Civil War, opium was hailed as “god’s own medicine”. God is, apparently, merciful as the plant is widely tolerant of temperate conditions; capable of withstanding drought later in its life cycle; and not particularly susceptible to pests and diseases. More importantly, gathering opium is a fairly simple, if laborious, process. After the flower petals fall, the seed pod is allowed to ripen for roughly two weeks. Then a series of shallow slashes or pin-pricks are made in the pod; latex seeps from these incisions and is scraped from the pod. Sun drying removes the water content, and the result is raw opium.

Not only did our ancestors have an effective pain reliever that could be produced with relative ease, but one that kept indefinitely without processing. In many parts of the world, opium is still cultivated for these same reasons. That opium is non-perishable and addictive makes it the quintessential agricultural commodity. The East India Company built an empire on it and nearly brought down a civilization with it. Users as varied as English intellectuals, Chinese coolies and Southern belles found themselves ensnared by opium, but opiate addiction was treated as an unfortunate malady rather than a social scourge until the beginning of the 20^th century. (It may be of interest to note that morphine was marketed as a ‘cure’ for opium addiction and heroin was claimed to cure morphine addiction.)

Contrary to popular belief, opium addiction does not incapacitate users…that is, the addict will not necessarily waste away in indolence. In the Orient, laborers were the most common users: opium allowing them to cope with the physical and emotional burdens of their low, social station. The US annexation of the Philippines set the stage for opium criminalization, when American officials were horrified by the rate of use on the islands. Until then, cultivation and use was spread broadly around the world, though the former was concentrated in Asia.

A series of control measures were enacted over the course of the 20^th century, which partially curbed opiate use – insomuch as you could no longer buy it over the counter – but also pushed the commodity into the black market.  Opium became even more profitable, though it became significantly more dangerous to profit from it. In 1953, a follow up to the Paris Convention designated seven nations as legal, export producers and allowed any nation to produce a domestic supply.  The major producer nations left off the list ignored the convention. One country appealed the decision and asked for an export license, “arguing opium was a vital cash crop supporting up to 90 percent of the population”. (Booth, 188) That country was Afghanistan, and the appeal was denied.

So it is incorrect to say that Afghanistan has an opium problem because of the violence that has wracked the nation since the late 1970’s; the violence and instability has only exacerbated the “problem”. A rugged, landlocked nation without significant transport infrastructure that receives seasonal rains has few options in cash crops that are saleable beyond local markets. More importantly, the horticultural cycle of poppies allows Afghan farmers to get a poppy crop and at least one other crop from the same earth. The poppy requires c. 120 days to mature; however, it is planted in the fall and survives the winter as an immature plant beneath the snow. In this way, opium can be harvested in the spring, leaving the remainder of the growing season for food crops. It is common for Afghan farmers to plant a second crop like maize, though any vegetable crop could follow poppies.

(There are varieties of Papaver somniferum that mature in as few as 55 days, and as home flower gardeners know, poppies can be perennial…though it would make no economic sense for a farmer to treat the plant as a perennial.)

Many other crops could be more profitable than opium, which is labor intensive, in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, every factor affecting agriculture in Afghanistan works against other crops and in favor of poppies. The US would like to see opium replaced by other short season crops, like cucumbers, but few – if any – of them could harvest as early as fall plantings of poppies. Pushing the date of the first harvest forward constrains the second harvest. Moreover, non-cereal crops rot. Without a reliable way to bring farm products to profitable markets, any and every replacement crop will lose the financial battle. Even as the farm gate price of opium has fallen, farmers still plant it. This is partially a function of reliability: low prices for opium are better than rotten cucumbers worth nothing. It is also a function of credit: farmers (even in the US) generally start the season on credit, so the crop that will get the loan gets planted. In Afghanistan that crop is opium, and much to the chagrin of the US, the creditors are corrupt officials or anti-occupation insurgents.

Changing Afghan agriculture will be herculean task. Only 25% of Afghanistan’s pre-war irrigation systems are operational, a fact that does not limit poppy farming but does make it difficult to bring the other half of Afghanistan’s arable land into production or replace poppies with other cash crops. Only 58% of rural Afghans have access to even seasonal roads, and many of them live an average of three miles from those. Fertilizer prices rose 30% between 2007 and 2009. And, amazingly, there is a perennial shortage of seeds that might grow replacement crops. (from the CFR)

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is keen on replacing opium with combination of common, market-garden crops and orchards. Several people have placed great hope in the Pomegranate, for which Afghanistan is famous. Tree crops, unfortunately, require years of dedicated land before producing reliable yields. Worse, many of Afghanistan’s orchards were destroyed after the US invasion…to plant poppies. Wheat is affected by world commodity market markets far more violently than opium, so any switch to wheat will last only as long as high wheat prices.

Replacing opium in Afghanistan will continue to fail so long as funding for agriculture is anemic. Between 2002 and 2006, USAID spent $4.4 billion in Afghanistan. Only 5% of that went to agriculture. The $24.7 million requested for agriculture related projects in 2009 is paltry compared to other expenditures, and it only raises the total spent since 2007 to $107.7 million. How much of those funds actually reach, and stay in, Afghanistan is questionable. USAID subcontracts many of its activities to private firms. (CFR) And the USDA will only have 64 staffers in Afghanistan by 2010; a massive increase from the three who were stationed there in 2003, but not anywhere near what’s needed.

If our commitment to Afghanistan is genuine, then our priorities must be rearranged. Attacking the opium trade is, in the long term, futile. If anything, all efforts should be directed at trans-shipment out of Afghanistan. Success in such a strategy would have the perverse effect of increasing farm gate prices, but that would help the Afghans who need it most. Farmers receiving more for their opium would need to plant less or be able to invest the proceeds in improving their farms. A civilian surge may well be required, though not under the assumption that Afghan farmers are ignorant and backwards. What Afghanistan does not need is to have the green revolution, export commodity model of agriculture forced upon it.

A hungry man is an angry man. Our efforts should focus on building sustainable agriculture models that provide sustenance and economic activity locally and regionally. High value export crops can be added after agricultural stability is attained, and any farmer worth the soil that he works will seek those out without any help from the USDA or Land ‘o’ Lakes. For the time being, opium fills that niche. We should avoid trapping Afghanistan in the globalized agriculture market, because that scenario is mostly likely to produce a return to massive poppy cultivation as soon as Afghanistan’s agricultural sector experiences any shock. The Afghan government is a long ways from being able to provide stability producing subsidies to farmers as the US does.

For every problem there are an infinite number of solutions and the problem of opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no different. Unfortunately, it appears the US has settled on the worst solution: lots of money for bullets and paramilitary drug war adventures. Until such time as our priorities for Afghanistan make sense in Afghanistan for Afghans and we focus our efforts on building the foundation of a stable society (food: politics starts at the breakfast table), we will reap only failure, violence and instability.

The Senate is prepared to discuss the problem of Afghan corruption at length. It must be all the marble and parliamentary silly-talk that makes these men immune to irony, because portions of the report’s section entitled “The Scope of Corruption” sound like a description of American politics if the reader mad-libs a little. The Senate is very worried about the scope of corruption from the drug trade in Afghanistan. It forgets, in its rush to explain how horrid Afghanistan is, that it already admitted to setting the stage for this very situation when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Or maybe the Honorable Senators think that they weren’t there, cheering on “the good war”…that they had no responsibility to oversee the comedy of errors that led us to this point they feel so compelled to decry. In any case, the Senators know evil when they see it. And they’re not afraid to dedicate three paragraphs to giving Ahmed Wali Karzai the Billy Carter treatment.

Opium corrupts absolutely, so the Senate should be unsurprised to find out that the rot may well reach to the presidential family. The question becomes what the Senate proposes to do about this corruption? Big plans, they have big plans.

The military, while not busy denying Al Qaeda safe haven, will be camping out near opium fields. It will be tasked with holding ground to “provide security” (no word on how secure the Afghan villagers will feel with a firefight waiting to happen in the neighborhood) so that opium farmers and traffickers will be pushed into less hospitable areas. The new security will also pave the way for DEA teams and the civilian surge that will right previous wrongs. Many acronyms new to the Afghan landscape will be involved, and there will be interdepartmental cooperation the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But the crown jewel of the “new strategies” is the blanket surveillance of cell traffic, which the Senate – perhaps with a touch of envy – points out is completely legal in Afghanistan. Those Afghans sure are lucky to be learning about freedom from the likes of us.

There will also be a new agency, the Joint Interagency Task Force, responsible for all sorts of Tom Clancy like Drug War adventures that the Senate likes to call, “Remove them from the Battlefield”. You’ve no doubt heard about the “hit list”, we’ll this is it and the brand new unit that has a brand new interpretation of the ROE to go with it.

The idea, and it’s a standard issue War on Drugs idea, is to go after the kingpins. Theoretically, the operation will fall apart without these men. Unfortunately, our record of actually apprehending kingpins in any of the drug trade is pretty spotty. And in a great many cases, the kingpin quietly walks out of jail after the media’s headline length attention span elapses. We’ll be treated to periodic declarations of a “major victory” in the Afghan narco-war, but the trade will continue on unabated. Kingpins are like politicians, there’s never a shortage of new ones to take the place of the old.

This narco war will require us to chase the drug traffickers into Pakistan. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) And it will continue the long story of chasing illicit opium production around the globe. The other major producer regions have been producing less and less opium as Afghanistan has produced more. According to the UNWDR2009, the Golden Triangle produced 420 metric tons of opium in 2008, compared to Afghanistan’s 7,700. By the law of supply and demand, a kilogram of opium in the Golden Triangle cost $310 at the farm gate. A kilo in Afghanistan fetched just $70, and a recent report suggests that the price has dropped to $48/kg. Golden Triangle growers have no hope of competing with the Afghan opium explosion on world markets, but Afghanistan’s recent over production will probably do more to curb the trade there than any action by the U.S. Still, that world market will remain and if/when production decreases in Afghanistan it will just as surely increase somewhere else.

There is too much money involved for the trade to stop. More importantly, the powers that be don’t want it to stop. Assuming that Newsweek is publishing correct figures, the street value of Afghanistan’s production is $52 billion. And while that is spread across a very large network of people, the largest profits gravitate towards the top of the pyramid. There is not much (aside from entering the black market arms trade) that you can do with billions in dirty money. Suitcases – or pallets – full of cash are a problem for the drug trade. It gets cleaned by the kind of quiet bankers who deal with very large sums, and it enters the regular economy where it does regular things like get invested, purchase casinos or keep Ferrari in business. Billions talk, and when they do people listen…even Senators.

Senators, however, are likely to pretend not to hear if those billions whisper about funding covert operations in America’s name. Extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, contract torturers and assassinations cost money. Or weapons. Or drugs. You can bet your bottom dollar that an honest history of our Afghan adventure will include American involvement in the drug trade that produces Senate Foreign Affairs memos.

It is interesting that the leading nation in The War on Drugs happens to occupy the country producing 90% of the word’s opium harvest, yet only 2% of world-wide opium seizures occur in Afghanistan. Put your money on Richard Armitage’s name to figure prominently in this sordidness. And a side-bet on US agencies pushing heroin into Iran as a lucrative means to destabilize a nation with one of the highest per capita opiate addiction rates in the world will probably be a winner too.

Image credit: Newsweek

Part 1…lying sidelong on a divan in the Senate cloakroom

That John Kerry and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee are a regular bunch of cards. Their Aug. 10 report, “Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents”, is funnier than a barrel of drunk monkeys. It opens with the statement: “At the end of March when President Obama fulfilled his pledge to make the war in Afghanistan a higher priority, he cast the U.S. role more narrowly than the previous administration: Defeat Al Quaeda and eliminate its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To accomplish these twin tasks, however, the President is making a practical commitment to Afghanistan that is far greater than his predecessor—more troops, more civilians, and more money.”

First, hasn’t that always been the goal of the U.S. in Afghanistan? Second, good luck. Third, only in Washington could someone say that the new, smaller goal is actually larger than the old, big goal with a straight face. No, the rest of the report doesn’t get any better. It’s full of whitewashes, diversions, sins of omission, and gaping holes. Welcome to rationalizations for a quagmire that you can believe in.

This report boils down the Obama administration’s change in talking points. Since it refuses to define “Taliban”, it is at pains to focus the discussion of Afghanistan as a narco war.

The drug trade that finances the insurgency must be stopped in order to provide security to stabilize the nation. True, so far as it goes. But it neglects to mention that opium has, since its criminalization, always found fertile ground in remote places that lack security. To be fair, the report does admit that opium cultivation increased after the U.S. invasion; however, it refuses to honestly address the fact that the U.S. invasion destroyed whatever security there was in Afghanistan and just how much opium production increased under the U.S. occupation. The Senate prefers to call the poppy boom an “unintended consequence”, which translates into something similar to “collateral damage” and suggests that the Senate is not very good at planning for the future.

Laying the historical context of opium in Afghanistan is the second most painful portion of the report. It’s fine if the reader has never opened a serious history book (Senators?), but otherwise reads like a shifty teenager trying to explain the stains on the carpet and smell of stale cigarette smoke when his parents return from vacation.

Before 1978, Afghanistan produced a paltry 300 tons of raw opium. Then it was “dragged through a decade of brutal warfare”…with no mention of the U.S. involvement. Not surprisingly, opium production grew amidst the chaos in agriculture that war generally produces. Those unintended consequences are a bitch. Again, there is no mention of the U.S. turning a blind eye (or aiding and abetting*) the opium trade that helped to fund the Afghan insurgents when we called them freedom fighters. We are treated to an oblique admission of some guilt on the part of the U.S. in the opium war-lords securing positions of power in the post-Taliban Afghan government. This was the unintended consequence of invading on the cheap.

It’s also nothing new. The South Vietnamese government was riddled with heroin traffickers, in this case selling mostly to American GI’s. In both cases, the U.S. finds itself between the rock of needing so-and-so in the existential fight against what’s-it-called and the hard place of so-and-so being deeply involved in the drug trade. But Richard Holbrooke has stated recently that the majority of the Taliban’s funds do not come from trafficking opium. They come from good old-fashioned racketeering, the payoffs being skimmed off the top of reconstruction money. (And, yes, Richard Holbrooke says a lot of things that may or may not be complete bullshit.)

The “Taliban” profits from the drug trade and the warlords-cum-government officials profit from it. Chances are that not a few Americans and perhaps some of America’s intelligence services have profited from the Afghan opium trade. The Russian mafia is certainly profiting, and Kosovar organized crime probably is too. That’s the thing about the drug trade, particularly the opium trade: there’s so much profit that everyone finds some. What’s interesting is that the Senate has come to the conclusion that Al Qaeda is not profiting from the Afghan drug trade. “Surprisingly, there is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds go to Al Qaeda.”

If our goal is to remove Al Qaeda and deny it safe haven, and Al Qaeda is not involved in the Afghan opium trade, then what does this beautiful little narco war have to do with our stated objective?

*“The CIA has admitted involvement with the money laundry known as the Shakarchi Trading which had handled both Kintex and Globus transactions as well as acting for the mafia in Sicily. The owner of the company, Mohammed Shakarchi, declared his firm had cleaned $25 million for the CIA between 1981 and 1988, which was used to support the Mujaheddin insurgents fighting the Russian occupation army in Afghanistan.” (Booth, 338) Kintex/Globus operated as a state-owned company in Bulgaria, earning fame and fortune by running guns into the Middle East and heroin into Europe.

Image credit: UPI

Q: Let’s say you’re sick with a potentially deadly disease. Who do you want for a doctor?
A: The smartest, most experienced and highly qualified expert in the field.

Q: You’re looking to invest your life savings. Who do you trust to handle your money?
A: The brightest, most agile financial mind I can find.

Q: You’ve been selected to participate in a “private citizens in space” program. Who do you want in charge of building the rocket?
A: The most brilliant and reliable engineers in the nation.

So far, so good. One more.

Q: You live in a time of unimaginable complexity and danger. Who do want to be the leader of the free world?
A: Somebody I can have a beer with. You know, a regular guy, a Joe Sixpack.

It’s said that people tend to get the leaders they deserve, and I can’t imagine better proof than the United States. At present we’re watching as a new president attempts to arm-tackle an array of national political and economic crises of evil supervillain jailbreak proportions, and at this early stage it’s far from clear that he’s Rushmore-bound.

• He may or may not get health care reform passed, and if he does it may or may not be as comprehensive as the programs pursued by previous arch-progressives Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
• He may or may not bog us down in a vastly expanded quagmire in Afghanistan, although at present only an idiot would bet on him meeting his campaign promises regarding getting the heck out of Iraq.
• He may or may not decide to honor the pledges he made to the gay community.
• He may or may not spearhead a green revolution that saves the species from itself.
• And his economic policies may boost us to new, unprecedented levels of universal prosperity. Or they may plummet us nards-first into a meat grinder of a global recession so epic it will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in the Hamptons.

So the jury is still out on Mr. Obama. But… While past performance is no guarantee of future results, there’s also that thing about those who don’t understand history being doomed to repeat it. And America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza. I’d love to be wrong, but let’s be honest. An indicator that can pick a loser 100% of the time is every bit as valuable to the shrewd investor as one that always picks the winner, and the Electoral College is as reliable a Finger of Doom as the world has ever seen.

Let’s review, shall we?

George W. Bush: Worst president ever? Dumbest president ever? Hard to say for certain, although put me down for “hell, yes.” The nation apparently elected a string of semi-housebroken wombats in the 1800s, and contemporary polling feels obliged, in the name of “balance,” to humor the estimations of conservative “scholars” who rate him the sixth-best ever. For my money, that opinion alone is sufficient for the credentialing institution to revoke the PhD, but such is the price we pay for the privilege of living in an society that not only tolerates fools gladly, it gives them television shows.

Bill Clinton: In so many ways, Clinton was the archetypal president of our age. He was the distilled, undiluted essence of the modern political animal. He was like everything in Washington, only moreso. And I don’t mean that in the good way.

Bubba may not be the man who invented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, but he was damned sure the one who established it as the only wing that mattered. The irony, of course, was that he was reviled by the GOP. I’ve always wondered if the source of that rage was that Clinton was a better Republican than they were.

In addition, he cheapened the office at every turn: whether renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidder, pardoning Marc Rich or “hiking the Appalachian Trail” like mink freebasing Viagra, it seemed as though his every action left us feeling the need for a shower. From the poor house to the penthouse to the whore house, we’ve never seen anything like him. God willing, we never will again.

George HW Bush: It’s still hard to fathom how this mealy-mouthed little wimp stumbled into the White House. All the Democrats had to do in 1988 was find a candidate with a pulse. Instead, they trotted out Mike Dukakis, a man with all the charisma and passion of an accountant on a phenobarbital drip.

Bush the Elder was the latest incarnation of an established and thoroughly corrupt dynasty, and between him and his fuckwit kids there is no better argument, could be no better argument, in favor of a 100% inheritance tax. If they’d had to earn anything on their own merit their only entree into a country club would be as assistant assistant assistant greenskeepers reporting to Carl Spackler at Bushwood.

Ronald Reagan: Wow. Where to start. Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan, in writing about where television was taking the culture, predicted Reagan in terms so accurate that you’d think you were reading a history instead of a precognition. The only thing missing was the name and home address. The failing in McLuhan’s analysis, if there was one, was this: as cynical as he was, the reality turned out to be even worse than he feared.

Ronnie was as anti-intellectual a leader as we could have imagined prior to Dubya. A man who somehow managed to remain immensely popular despite the fact that most Americans disagreed with his policies. One of the most corrupt collections of advisors, staffers and appointees in history. And the man who represented the grand triumph of years and years of scheming by wealthy conservatives bent on by god rolling the rich-poor gap back to feudal levels. An intellectually void, amoral cesspool of a human being who will nonetheless go down as one of our “great” presidents.

Jimmy Carter: Carter has the distinction of being one of the very few politicians that Hunter Thompson ever said anything nice about, and his record since leaving the White House has made clear what an outstanding statesman and humanitarian Carter really is. History will not mark him down as the most adept practitioner of the presidential arts, however, and for those who bemoan the erosion of the line between church and state, let’s remember just how very publicly Baptist Jimmy was. Now, thanks in part to him, we’ll never get the smell of the fundamentalists out of the furniture. (Which reminds me – Phish is playing four dates at Red Rocks, so those of us who live in downtown Denver are hoping the wind isn’t blowing straight west-to-east for the next few days.)

Gerald Ford: Nice enough guy, seemed like. For a politician and all. But he wasn’t ever elected.

Richard Nixon: Please tell me we don’t really need to talk about this one.

Lyndon Johnson: Ever heard of Vietnam? It’s hard to recall the last time somebody took an idea so bad and managed to make it even worse. He does get credit for important civil rights legislation, at least.

Still, in the final analysis he was a president from Texas with a lust for illicit, unwinnable wars. If that reminds you of somebody else, don’t blame me. I’m just reporting the facts.

John F. Kennedy: He invaded Cuba, and once the troops started landing he changed his mind. He nearly got us into a hot nukular shooting war. Then there was that Vietnam thing – he and LBJ can share this honor. Marilyn Monroe was either a plus or a minus, depending on where you stand with respect to the marital infidelity issue.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved his legacy was death. Had he lived to serve out his term(s) he’d be judged today based on his record, which falls somewhat short of the legend.

So, when was the last time America elected a president it could be proud of? By today’s standards Ike isn’t looking bad at all, and his two predecessors, FDR and Truman, also score high marks.

If you look at that chart in the link above, it seems like maybe the country’s ability to elect somebody half decent runs in cycles.

Let’s hope that’s the case, and that the wheel is turning back in our direction. Because damn, America is due.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I thought I heard you promise not to use supplemental war funding bills any more. Apparently, according to PoliFact, I misheard (thank Bush for only funding Iraq and Afghanistan through September, 2009, instead of the whole year). But still, I’d really like to know how those programs are related to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, that’s right. They’re not.

I’ve railed against emergency supplemental war funding bills for several years now. After all, we’ve been in Iraq for just over six years and in Afghanistan for nearly eight – you’d think we knew how much they were costing us every year. To his credit, Obama claims that he’s going to regularly fund the military in Iraq and Afghanistan via the normal appropriations bills starting in fiscal year 2010 (as of October 1, 2009). We’ll see. But there’s no way that a cash-for-clunkers program has anything to do with a war supplemental.

My issue isn’t that the IMF money and preparations for flu pandemic don’t qualify as emergencies. Depending on how serious the CDC and WHO think the pandemic will be come the start of this year’s flu season, supplemental funding for pandemic flu preparations may be an excellent idea. And if the IMF needs more money to keep the rest of the world from falling even deeper into recession and, not incidentally, dragging down the US with it, then by all means, procure supplemental funds for the IMF too. But don’t attach it to a “war funding” supplemental. Be honest about what you’re doing, come clean with the taxpayers and voters, and do it with different supplementals – one for the occupations of two sovereign nations, one for IMF funding, and a third for flu pandemic preparedness.

Sure, it’s less efficient – but it’s also more honest because it allows each of the supplementals to pass or fail based on their own merits, rather than on the merits of “funding the troops.” And attaching a non-emergency spending provision like the cash-for-clunkers program to a “must pass” bill is about as honest as attaching an amendment opening up national parks to people carrying loaded and concealed firearms to a credit card reform bill.

Oh, that’s right, Congress already did that.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming a levee.)

So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is no military solution and continuing to employ attrition tactics that make more new bad guys than they attrite. It’s enough to make Clausewitz claw at his coffin lid.

Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can accomplish the policy aim. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and after that you start working details like logistics.

But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was already building $1.1 billion worth of Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to accommodate additional troops, and planned to begin spending an additional $1.3 billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you want; then Congress has to throw good money after it or be labeled as “weak on national security.”

Gates’s bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the Post reported, they began “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates.” That’s a traditional military leadership technique known in the trenches as “the buck stops there.”

The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in a recent Rolling Stone article as “Obama’s chess masters”—unveiled a white paper describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on “realistic and achievable” objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “Increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” is a pipe dream that, even if it comes true, would simply give us one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t control. Their initiative for “involving the international community” makes one wonder if they’ve been paying attention at all. To hear Gates tell it, everything that’s gone wrong in the Bananastans is NATO’s fault, so why would we want more international involvement?

The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its “core goal,” which is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.” Modern terrorists need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only sanctuary they need to plan and coordinate their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.

The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a “new way of thinking” and “building a clear consensus.” The paper even has talk of bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, it’s not “economic assistance” or “education and training.” It’s “war.”

When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. “A strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and resourced,” the chess set tells us in its white paper. I wonder which they’ll do first: create the program or make it more effective.

I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level up to retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the defense apparatus of its thundering flock of foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead from brain hemorrhage before they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but don’t count on it.

I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still become Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better to charge down a hill than up one.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death. Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job. How about them apples? Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into.

The warmongery that controls the Pentagon and Congress never did take any of that Iraq withdrawal timeline jive seriously. Defense secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser James Jones, “King David” Petraeus and Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno are all on record as having said withdrawal timelines are a bad idea. Odierno has, through Petraeus publicist Tom Ricks, broadly expressed his desire to see 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015, Status of Forces Agreement and Obama campaign promises be damned. Early in April, Odierno put out the word that he might ignore the June 30 deadline for U.S. troops to leave Iraqi cities, and it looked like another domino was about to drop in the Pentagon’s “hell no, we won’t go” strategy. Then Maliki said “not so fast,” and told Babe Odierno to have his troops out of Mosul and the rest of the cities by the end of June and that they couldn’t go back without a hall pass.

Two aspects of this event should shock every American. First is that Odierno, who is four levels down in the chain of command (under Obama, Gates and Petraeus) announced he might unilaterally abrogate an occupation arrangement agreed to at a level higher than his. Second, and perhaps more alarming, is that the only guy who threw the bull plop flag about it was the prime minister of the occupied country. Nobody in the White House or Congress did anything but put palm prints on the seats of their pants. The military’s take over of America is now so complete that the Buck Turgidsons and Jack D. Rippers can do whatever they want and the rest of the body politic demurs as if it’s the Pentagon’s Constitutional right to dictate policy to the executive and the legislature.

There’s one political journalist, though, who’s willing to pretend the Obama administration hasn’t been rolled flat by the military industrial cash caisson. With his article in the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, Robert Dreyfus has become for Team Obama what Tom Ricks is for Team Petraeus and what Joseph Goebbels was for you-know-who. “Obama’s Chess Masters” is as a stunning a piece of White House propaganda as anything Dick Cheney’s minions ever filtered through the New York Times. “The president has assembled a trusted circle of advisers to oversee all aspects of national security from the White House,” Dreyfus blares in the lede. “It’s the most centralized decision-making I’ve ever seen,” one source tells him. G.W. Bush let Cheney and Rummy run the show and make all the decisions, Dreyfus reports, but not Obama. No sir. Obama is the, uh…decider in this administration.

Dreyfus manages to make Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times look like real journalists in comparison. His sources include “a well-connected defense and intelligence consultant,” “a senior Capitol Hill staffer,” “an insider,” “several insiders,” “one veteran of both the State Department and the Pentagon” and—perhaps the most credible voice in the article—“the Washington rumor mill.”

The piece’s named sources are so blatantly sleeping in the commander in chief’s tent that Dreyfus might as well have just asked Michelle who she thought was running the show. Leslie Gelb, who hasn’t been right about a single aspect of U.S. foreign policy from Vietnam on, avows that, “They’re making decisions there, at the White House. On everything.” Dreyfus paints National Security Adviser Jones as the kind of hard-boiled hawk the neocons better not mess with. “He’s pro nuclear” Dreyfus relates. “He likes oil drilling.” As if those right wing crackers credentials weren’t sufficiently malignant, Dreyfus throws in “He was on the boards of Boeing and Chevron.” Shudder.

William Cohen, whose chief accomplishment as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary was to hide in his office while his generals cocked up the Kosovo War, testifies that during his tenure he wanted James Jones on his team because “he knew where the bodies were buried, and I wanted to make sure that mine wasn’t among them.” It sounds like Cohen is still afraid enough of Jones to play ball with Obama’s spin merchants and make the guy sound like a Cheney-class leg breaker. Scary, huh kids?

From Dreyfus himself (supposedly) we hear that “The foreign policy vision that animates Obama and his team might be described best as a ‘Goldilocks’ approach: not too hot, not too cold. It’s a just-right philosophy.” Jesus, Larry and Curly. Do you think they had to waterboard Dreyfus to get him to paste that piffle into the article?

All this smoke about Obama’s national security team being large and in charge would be well and good except that they’ve already revealed themselves to be a team of bus riding Bozos. Their most spectacular pratfall has been their mumbling, bumbling, tumbling, fumbling Bananastan strategy. Get this:

During the campaign, Obama screws up and says that whatever success the surge in Iraq might have had (it really had none), it got in the way of putting enough troops into Afghanistan to “get the job done.” The Pentagon’s long war mafia chortles with glee, and the next thing you know, David McKiernan, the general in charge of the Bananastan bungle, says he needs at least 30,000 more troops for five more years or so. Gates and Mullen and the Joint Chiefs say, Yeah, yeah, he really, really needs those troops, give them to him, okay? So Obama asks the Joint Chiefs what they see as the “end game” in Afghanistan and they start staring at something a thousand yards behind Obama’s head. Obama calls McKiernan in Afghanistan and asks him what he plans to do with the 30,000 extra troops and McKiernan says, “Hey, somebody’s at the door.”

Then Obama hunkers down with his chess club, and they decide that the best compromise between doing nothing to doing something stupid is doing something half-baked. Obama agrees to send McKiernan a little over half the troops he wants—17,000—and tells his team to come up with a strategy for the generals who are apparently so busy fighting wars they can’t be bothered with planning them.

On March 17, Obama’s national security team releases the new strategy for the Bananastans; it’s an eye-watering compendium of fog, friction and humbug. It features an array of “realistic and achievable objectives,” none of which are realistic or achievable or particularly connected to national security.

The New York Times quoted “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” as saying the new strategy does not involve nation building, even though its aims include things like “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” You know—nation building. The strategy also speaks of denying al Qaeda and other Islamofabulists “sanctuary” from which they can launch terror attacks. The notion that evildoers need a physical sanctuary is quainter than a tea cozy. Given the global proliferation of cheap communication equipment and even cheaper extremists eager to blow themselves to smithereens, the top terror guys can plan and execute attacks from a bleacher seat in the Himalayas or the Cannes Film Festival or the far side of the moon.

As Obama transitions from his 100-day honeymoon into his permanent bubble, I can’t help but wonder whether he knows he’s surrounded by fools and fanatics or if he’s been in the puzzle palace long enough now to have become as puzzled as everyone else in it.

Does he take what his loonies say seriously? I really want to think he puts on an elaborate show of listening to what they say, then shoos them out of the office, and calls up guys like al Maliki and says, “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

They all stumble into similar failings too.  It’s hard to get delicate fruit out of a country without significant transport infrastructure.  Not many health-food companies will be overly keen to set up processing facilities in the region.  The plan will only remain successful so long as the pomegranate is not usurped as the king of live forever foods and customers in the developed world can afford to splurge on wildly expensive health food.  Oh, and the fact that huge tracts of mature pomegranate orchards were cut down and replaced with poppies over the course of the good war.

We’re not getting Afghanistan right, and nothing in the latest plans suggest that we will get it right any time soon.  Are we even sure what it is we hope to accomplish or even why we’re trying to accomplish it?

It’s not a good war; it’s a fool’s errand.  Being a mythologized graveyard of failing empires has nothing to do with it, or at least no more to do with it than the nation of Afghanistan had to do with 9/11.  And that’s with unquestioned acceptance of 9/11’s institutional history.  Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Afghanistan, so we invaded a country to apprehend a few hundred people as if our tool box consists only of sledgehammers and reciprocating saws.  But somehow (wonder of all wonders) we are still threatened by these same men and a great many more Afghans now hate us because we showed up at their house with our toolbox.  Tim “the tool man” Taylor does Central Asia without the lovable learning of life lessons.

Pundits from both sides of the political divide like to wax nostalgic about the good ole days of post-9/11 war fever and how we ousted the Taliban with our military might.  We did very little; we certainly did not triumph militarily.  We gave money, arms and intelligence to the Northern Alliance.  We inserted a few special operations groups.  And we provided air support.  That is, we bombed the living shit out of Afghanistan.  The Northern Alliance ousted the Taliban.  Their repayment came in the form of government positions, allowing them to become the corrupt warlord-bureaucrats that the United States now considers part of the problem.

If only the American populace and its elected representatives were not so averse to reading the lessons of history we might be able to have an informed conversation on the situation in Afghanistan.  What we decided to fight in 2001 was, quite clearly, what we had helped create during the 1980’s.  The Soviets could not pacify Afghanistan with 150,000 soldiers.  There is some evidence that the Red Army learned from its early mistakes and was making headway in its bid to crush the Afghan resistance, and then the Stingers arrived.  The Soviets failed in the end.  Overwhelming air superiority didn’t win the day.  150,000 troops did not win the day.  Not even a willingness to match the brutality of the mujahiden won the day.  That is the most significant difference between the Soviet and American military experiences in Afghanistan.  It is helpful, in the course of military affairs, to be unfettered by the need to prove your civility through refinements of barbarity.

Our plans to get Afghanistan right do not include a full-blown Imperial March of wanton slaughter and field salting.  Whether that would even be successful is immaterial as the concept is off the table in every venue aside from the masturbatory fantasies of neo-cons who write about the glories of war.

Our current plan looks an awful lot like a cross between the plan to bloody the Soviets and the famed “surge strategy” of Iraq.  We will commit more, but not enough, troops to the Afghan battlefields at the same time we will form relationships of convenience with “moderate Taliban”.  No definitions of either moderate or Taliban are forthcoming from the administration.  It appears that our first forays into co-opting Afghan fighters – again – will focus on Mr. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

While the CIA backed the mujahedin, Hekmatyar received between 20 and 25% of American funds totaling “several hundred million dollars” (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp 165).  It is not possible to calculate Hekmatyar’s share of the estimated $25 million per month in funding that came from Arab and Pakistani sources.  But his anti-Americanism was well known enough to provoke questions on Capitol Hill and even instigate congressional audits of how – and more importantly with whom – the CIA was operating.  Considering the fact that Congress allocated $1.1 billion for covert action in Afghanistan for just ‘86 and ‘87, these were no small questions.

Even late in the game when State, the US special envoy, and British intelligence called for the CIA to “move away from Hekmatyar and an ISI-led military solution” (Coll, 197), the CIA continued its support of the most violent jihadists, and not incidentally the most religiously fundamental.  They believed that Hekmatyar and the Muslim Brotherhood networks could be “managed and contained”. (Coll, 198)  Those networks couldn’t be managed or contained.  The money had attracted thousands of Arab volunteers, often disliked by Afghan mujahedin for their desecration of Afghan graves and other actions stemming from their strict interpretation of Wahhabist Islam.

But through both the ISI and the CIA, it was these groups that continued to receive the most funding.  After the First Gulf War, heavy weapons abandoned by the Iraqi army – including Soviet T-72’s – were shipped to Afghanistan and found their way to the likes of Hekmatyar and the Arab volunteers.  It was in these tanks that Hekmatyar rode towards Kabul after the US and the crumbling end of the Soviet Union agreed to cut off all funds to both sides of the conflict as of January 1, 1992.  But Massoud beat Hekmatyar to Kabul, which ignited vicious battles for the capitol between ever-shifting alliances of warlords.  When the Taliban – backed by the ISI and one Mr. Bin Laden – made their move on Kabul, Hekmatyar and Massoud formed a brief alliance of convenience.  Hekmatyar, however, sold out to the Taliban and allowed Massoud’s forces to be roundly defeated.  Those forces would not see Kabul again until they entered the city as proxies of the United States in 2001.  The Taliban exiled Hekmatyar to Iran and most of his forces gathered under the Taliban banner.

But after 9/11, Iran expelled Hekmatyar and he returned to Afghanistan with a price on his head to be paid by the United States of America.   A drone-fired missile attack missed Hekmatyar in 2002.  Always ready to shift his allegiances to match his short-term interests, Hekmatyar put together a new army and formed a loose confederation with the Taliban in a jihad to expel the US/NATO occupation.  The Karzai government has longed worked at splitting Hekmatyar from the Taliban and even bringing him into the Afghan government.  A representative for Hekmatyar attended the exploratory talks between the Karzai government and the Taliban in July, 2008.

A month previous to those talks, Hekmatyar’s brother-in-law was transferred out of Bagram and into an Afghan prison from which he was released.  As Peter Lee points out, such a move could not have happened without US approval.  And in January of 2009, Hekmatyar’s brother was released from Pakistani custody.

The courting of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar appears to predate the Obama administration’s AfPak plan and the recent deputy-to-deputy talks reported by The Telegraph.

If Hekmatyar is Holbrooke’s Afghan hope, then we would be wise to question the long-term implications of allying with a man of Hekmatyar’s history.  While he currently preaches Afghan democracy, he also insists that such a state cannot exist with foreign troops occupying Afghanistan.  Moreover, his record hardly suggests him to be a standard bearer of peace and human rights.  And we would be foolish to leave unconsidered the idea that Hekmatyar is positioning himself for victory in a post-American occupation civil war.

The “new” plan to get Afghanistan right looks suspiciously like the plan enacted during the 1980’s.  Even some of the most influential names remain unchanged, and that begs the question: “How and why will this plan turn out any differently than that plan?”  There is little debate that what followed the Soviet-Afghan war and CIA support for the mujahedin led to the failed state that was – and still is – Afghanistan.  The very reason that we supposedly find ourselves in Afghanistan is a direct effect of our previous machinations in the region.  The principles debating the Afghan strategy should reread the clichéd definition of insanity.

If only it was so simple as planting pomegranates.  But there is nothing simple about this situation, and political attempts to simplify it will come to no good ends.  The problem is not, as Vice President Biden argues, getting the United States bogged down in a Central Asian quagmire.  The problem is a timely extrication from the Central Asian quagmire that the United States entered in 1979.  After nearly thirty years of getting Afghanistan terribly wrong, we show no indications of turning a significant corner towards finally getting it right.  Whether we even can may well be an issue too great for the present administration, particularly so long as it continues to march the long path of previous failure.

The propaganda war on the American public appears to have entered a new phase.

In a March 30 post at his Foreign Policy blog, Thomas E. Ricks wrote, “I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn’t think that would begin happening this quickly. It’s only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.” Ricks cited a number of recent confrontations between members of the Sunni Awakening movement and Nuri al Maliki’s government and got all giddy about how he “wouldn’t be surprised to see Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia re-emerge.”

At the end of his blog, Ricks asks “Question of the day: What should I say the next time someone tells me the surge ‘worked’?”

Ricks will almost certainly say the same thing he’s been saying to Chris Matthews and David Gregory and Washington Post readers and everyone else who’s wasted bandwidth on him since his latest book came out: “General Odierno…would like to see 35,000 American troops [in Iraq] in 2015.” That is, after all, neocon message number one these days: Status of Force agreement and campaign promises be damned; the generals say we need to stay in Iraq so that’s what we need to do. And Ricks, along with the rest of the so-called liberal media, is falling all over himself to help the neocons echo it.

Ricks might also answer along the line of propaganda operations hinted at by a March 31 New York Times story that leads with “As the American military prepares to withdraw from Iraqi cities, Iraqi and American security officials say that jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight.” Obama’s announced withdrawal timeline, goes the narrative, is what has caused the “new insurgency.” That’s a branch of the original story line that said once we announced a withdrawal date the evildoers would “wait us out.” (“Branches and sequels” are the parts of operational plans that describe what to do when things don’t go according to plan.)

The new narrative argues that Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki wants to mop up on the Sunni Awakening fighters while we’re still around to help him do it. As journalist Gareth Porter notes, Maliki has drawn us into a fight—possibly a long term one—with the very Sunni militants we bribed to stop fighting Maliki and us, and whose cooperation we previously credited for the “success” of the surge. In a saner American century, this would have been the camel straw, the signal that finally, for God’s sake, it was time to roll up our tents and bring our sideshow home, two-headed chicken and all. But in the present American century, where Newspeak and Doublethink have supplanted logic and reasoned discourse, it is all the more reason to stay. As in George Orwell’s 1984, we switch sides whenever necessary in order to keep the war going.

It’s quite possible that all our yesterdays in Iraq will have merely led that country back to the dusky state it was in before we invaded it. Having consolidated his power with backing from us, al Maliki is on the brink of becoming another Saddam Hussein. That too, in the hands of bull feather merchants like Ricks, will become a reason for us to stay in Iraq. We’ll need to keep Maliki from becoming a new Saddam Hussein, or to make sure he becomes a new Saddam Hussein who plays ball with us, or to overthrow the new Saddam Hussein and make sure the next new Saddam Hussein does or doesn’t become like the old new Saddam Hussein and/or the original one.

Don’t think that justifying eternal occupation of Iraq is a cakewalk, though. Using the country’s unraveling as the excuse for staying throws a torpedo into the myth of a successful surge strategy. So first, the spin merchants have to re-revise their own revised history, then they have to plaster over the gash they’ve made in the time space continuum.

Ricks led the charge in that sector of effort. In February, he told NBC’s Chris Mathews that “we have armed to the teeth many Iraqis” and have “trained up and organized a Shiite-dominated army” and “made friends with the Sunni insurgency, put them on our payroll,” so “there‘s a lot of gasoline that Americans have potentially poured on this fire” and if we leave Iraq “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.” On Meet the Press, he told David Gregory “none of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve have been solved.”

At first blush, that kind of talk doesn’t speak well of General David Petraeus, the Macarthur of Mesopotamia and, according to defense secretary Robert Gates, the “hero of the hour” who presided over the “remarkable turnaround” of Iraq.

Fear not, though, Ricks has King David’s back covered. According to Rick’s new book The Gamble, it wasn’t Petraeus or even neocon luminary Fred Kagan who invented the surge. It was General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno, the guy Ricks earlier told us was the big dumb slob who made such a mess of things right after the fall of Baghdad with his 4^th Infantry Division and caused the insurgency and the civil war and everything else that went wrong. Sometime after that, according to Ricks, Odie went through a “transformation.” An angel came unto him in the night and gave him an immaculate conception of what a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq ought to look like, or something like that. The important thing is that when there’s anything good to be said about the surge, the warmongery can credit Petraeus (and to a lesser extent Kagan), and when it’s time to tell the truth about it, they can blame the oaf.

It’s important to maintain the illusion of Petraeus as “the best general in the Army,” which was how Ricks described him at the beginning of the surge. That’s because the warmongery needs Petraeus’s clout in mugging President Obama into further escalation of—and entanglement in—the war in the Bananastans. On April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, Petraeus told a Senate panel that extremists in Pakistan ““could literally take down their state” if left unchallenged, thus endorsing John McCain’s initiative to send an additional 10,000 troops to the Bananastans on top of the 4,000 additional troops Obama just promised to send on top of the 7,000 additional troops he already promised a to send on top of the 38,000 troops already there.

Sadly, even if we have half a million troops in the Bananastans (like we did in Vietnam), they can’t accomplish anything without a coherent strategy, which they still don’t have despite the recent unveiling of Obama’s new Bananastan plan, the tenets of which sound like his policy team stole them from Scientology. The new strategy’s stated objectives include a “capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and a “stable constitutional government in Pakistan,” goals impossible to achieve without extraterrestrial intervention. Inexplicably, while these two aims would constitute the reengineering of an entire region’s social structure, presidential advisers who crafted the strategy maintain that it does not constitute nation building. Even more inscrutably, prominent foreign policy analyst Pat Lang agrees that the new strategy avoids “multi-decade nation building.” This observation suggests that Lang has been nipping at the Kool-Aid he accused so many of chugging during the Bush administration or that he’s suffering from the long-term effects of having been a military intelligence officer. It’s hard to say which; the symptoms are nearly identical.

The strategy’s objectives also include “Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” That might be achievable, but it’s not a goal worth pursuing. If evil ones can plan and launch terrorists attacks from a bleacher seat in the mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, they can do it from the other side of the Van Allen radiation belt (and the North Koreans can put them out there now!)

The aspect of the new strategy I find hardest to believe is that none of the goals involve keeping the Islamofabulists from getting control of Pakistan’s nukes or the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. Those are the only real national security concerns we have in that region, ones we can decisively address with military power by blowing up the nukes and the pipeline, declaring victory and bringing everybody home.

Alas, that would be counter to the real objective of the neoconservative agenda, which is progressive military entanglement. If you’re not yet convinced that’s what the war mongrels are after, take a look at what their most prominent pundits are saying about Obama’s new strategy. Bill Kristol cries, “All hail Obama!” Kritol’s partner Bob Kagan cheers, “Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan.” Charles Krauthammer calls the Obama strategy one that you can imagine “John McCain having adopted had he been elected.”

This is the clearest signal I’ve seen to date that America’s collective brain activity has flatlined. Obama’s election was above all a national rejection of the militaristic adventurism of the previous regime. Yet here we are, not only continuing Bush era foreign policy but expanding it, and America is watching it unfold dumbly, like a dazed Jake La Motta, clinging to the top rope and rasping Come on, hit me. Harder.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

–Anonymous U.S. military officer

As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language?

During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not satisfied that any of the active duty generals would toe the line sufficiently, brought his old cow tipping buddy Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to replace Shinseki. Rummy had sent an unmistakable message: it was his way or the exit ramp. The remaining generals either fell into lockstep or kept their own counsel, and we got four years of dead-enders in their last throes.

As the 2006 elections neared, almost everyone at Defense, including Rumsfeld, was talking about lowering public expectations for Iraq and beginning a drawdown of U.S. presence. Narcissus, however, wouldn’t let young Mr. Bush lose a war that could be lost on his successor’s watch. Levers were pulled, wheels turned, somebody shoved a pie in the Iraq Study Group’s face and, voila, out trotted the surge.

For the longest time we thought neoconservative academic Fred Kagan was the chief architect of the surge. Recently, Thomas E. Ricks told us that the real genius behind the Iraq escalation was David Petraeus’s 300 lb. lapdog Ray Odierno. That assertion required a worm-to-butterfly transformation of Odierno, whom Ricks had earlier portrayed as the bull in the china shop who single-handedly fomented the Iraq civil war. Now Odie’s the Desert Ox.

Whoever actually cooked up the surge, the Joint Chiefs and commander in Iraq General George Casey were dead set against it. But then the dope dealing commenced and the four-stars’ objections faded like the Chicago Cubs. The ground service generals were promised a larger Army and Marine Corps, Casey got the Army chief of staff assignment and Admiral Mike Mullen was promised the chairman’s job.

January 2007 was a key month in American history. On the fifth, the American Enterprise Institute published Fred Kagan’s Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq. On January 10, Mr. Bush announced that he would increase U.S. presence in Iraq by 21,000 troops. On the twelfth, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain endorsed the surge and became the de facto presidential candidate of the neoconservative movement.

January 2007 was also the month David Petraeus assumed command of international forces in Iraq. Tom Ricks kick started the public image campaign to make Petraeus into a five-star deity, describing the general in the media as a “fascinating character” who was “just about the best general in the Army” and, oh yeah, “quite ambitious.” Ricks noted Petraeus’s “very successful first tour in Iraq in 2003-2004,” referring to his command in Mosul, but did not mention how Mosul collapsed after Petraeus left and the bribes he’d been handing out dried up. That January was also the month the Bush administration promised to provide evidence that Iran was providing arms to Iraqi militants. The administration never did prove those accusations, but that didn’t prevent it from repeating them loudly and often.

One of the loudest Iran bashers was Petraeus, who didn’t even pretend to have credible proof Iran was arming Iraqi militants. Reminiscent of the joke about the man beating his wife, Petraeus simply challenged Iran to prove that they had stopped arming Iraqis. Then Irony cleared its throat: in August 2007 a story broke that in 2004, while in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus had lost track of 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols that couldn’t have walked anywhere but into the hands of the Iraqi militants Iran was supposedly arming. Irony might also mention that as Petraeus was arming the insurgency, Doctor Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College began work on the new counterinsurgency field manual that Ricks and others would later claim Petraeus “wrote.”

Petraeus pursued an aggressive information campaign that promoted the agenda he shared with the neocons to establish a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. His most outrageous publicity stunt was the March 2007 Baghdad shopping spree he staged for McCain and McCain’s office wife Lindsey Graham. At a news conference, McCain, Graham and other Republicans remarked that they could “mix and mingle unfettered” with Iraqis and that the market reminded them of “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time.” The next day, the New York Times and other sources revealed that Petraeus had put more than 100 of his troops in harm’s way to provide security for a propaganda demonstration supporting the surge strategy and the McCain candidacy.

Admiral Mullen also tried to tip the election toward the GOP. In a July 2008 Joint Force Quarterly article, Mullen wrote that every day, troops asked him questions like “What if a Democrat wins? What will that do to the mission in Iraq?” (Italics Mullen’s.) The article’s title (Irony winks) was “From the Chairman: Military Must Stay Apolitical.”

Also that month, right after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki agreed with candidate Obama that 16 months would be the right interval for a withdrawal timeline, Mullen warned on FOX News that a withdrawal timeline would be “dangerous.” In his July JFQ article, Mullen wrote that “we [in the military] defend the Constitution” by “obeying the orders of the commander in chief.” He didn’t specify whether he meant obeying all commanders in chief or just the Republican ones, but he didn’t have to. Everybody got the message.

By mid-summer 2008, Petraeus had beaten Admiral William Fallon two out of three falls for control of Central Command, he had hand picked the next generation of Army generals, and young Mr. Bush had announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and if U.S. troops would redeploy from Iraq. Petraeus and his long war generals owned American foreign policy, and they were determined to keep it. Fortunately for them, their best course of action was obvious: they merely had to keep doing what they were doing, which was entrenching America deeper and deeper in to Iraq. If McCain pulled an upset in the election, great, he was already on board. The beauty part was that Obama would have to go along with what the long warriors wanted as well. If he crossed them openly, and things went poorly (which they’re bound to whether Obama follows their advice or not), it would be Obama’s fault for ignoring his generals. Defense secretary Robert Gates turned a nice trick in this vein during a recent interview on Meet the Press. He told David Gregory that the generals would obey the mandate to end the combat mission in Iraq by August 2010, but if they “had had complete say in this matter, they would have preferred that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”

Obama played into the long war strategy by insisting he would finish the job in Afghanistan. Now his generals are pushing him into an aimless escalation of that conflict that will likely make us the latest superpower to embalm itself in that part of the world. Nobody in the Pentagon is taking the Iraq Status of Forces agreement’s December 2011 deadline seriously. The ink on the SOF was barely dry when both Mullen and Odierno smirked that “three years is a long time,” and that the situation cold change. Gates claims that Obama himself may force Maliki to renegotiate the agreement. Thanks to Ricks, Odierno is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015. And if anyone thinks to question the need to sustain these two wars, the long generals can always tell another lie about Iran (like Mullen did recently when he said the Iranians have enough fissile material to make a bomb—they don’t) and claim that our presence in Iraq and the Bananastans is necessary to keep Iran contained.

Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution, which means far more to them than the Constitution they swore to protect or the country they’re supposedly defending. In a finer era of American journalism, editorial pages across the nation would have demanded the forced retirement of every four-star on active duty. Today’s big news media, unfortunately, are either afraid of the Pentagon or in its corner. Congress has been on life support for nearly a decade, and as we have discussed, Obama political constraints are considerable.

It’s up to what few retired or active duty generals of integrity we have left to confront the junta in a very public “have you no sense of decency?” moment.

Unfortunately, that would amount to generals ratting out fellow generals, which would violate their honor code.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton bombed relations with the Iranians back to the Cheney age when she said that diplomacy with Iran probably won’t work. You can be assured it won’t work if she’s in charge of it. After two days of talks in Egypt and Israel, where she heard “over and over and over again” how worried Arabs and Israelis are about the Persian state, she accused Iran of “fomenting” divisions in the Arab world and seeking to “intimidate as far as they think their voice can reach.” That’s abject hypocrisy coming from the chief diplomat of a superpower that single-handedly placed the Middle East in a state of perpetual turmoil. If Hillary’s remarks were calculated, they were miscalculated. We need a secretary of state who sounds like an intelligent adult, not a two-faced harpy who flies around the world hurling fireballs at straw men. We just had four years of that from Keystone Kondi.

Hillary has confirmed that despite her campaign claim of possessing a foreign policy experience edge over Obama, it was Bill, not she, who was commander in chief during the Clinton administration. Like candidate Hillary, Secretary Hillary feels the need to act tough so the draft dodging neocons won’t call her a girly man. She shouldn’t worry. They’ll call her a girly man no matter what she does. And if she goes into high orbit every time the Arabs and Israelis lie to her about Iran, she’ll never come down to earth.

The neocons will never have anything bad to say about Hillary’s counterpart at Defense. Bill Kristol must have thought he’d ascended into heaven when young Mr. Bush named Bob Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Gates was brought in to serve as a welcome mat for the surge strategy, the key to attaining Kristol’s dream of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Kristol especially likes having a warmonger around who says even dumber things than he does.

Gates is a grand master of self-contradiction, as he illustrated once again on a recent Tavis Smiley Show. He said that one of the “biggest lessons learned” from the Iraq experience “is if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have.” Gates repeated that sentiment several times, then noted that the war in Afghanistan is now his “biggest challenge,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that he encouraged Obama to preemptively escalate the conflict there on the basis of no intelligence at all. We will never have good intelligence on the Bananastans. You can count the number of people who speak both Pashtun and English and can also pass a background check on the toes and fingers of a duck. Our best sources of intelligence on Afghanistan and Pakistan are Afghan and Pakistani intelligence officials. If we’re going to trust them, we may as well believe everything the Mossad tells us.

You’d think Gates would understand that, having been chief of the CIA, but you’d be wrong. Where Hillary made her mark in Washington by clinging to a coattail, Gates built his career as a bureaucratic dimwit the old fashioned way: by not rocking the boat. He “succeeded” as Secretary of Defense by telling Bush what he wanted to hear and being more popular with his subordinates than Rummy was, a feat considerably easier than falling off a log. You do everything General A tells you to do, say everything General B tells you to say, pretend you don’t know General C is tagging his enlisted driver and, by golly, you’re such a military genius the next administration simply has to keep you on for a year or so.

After Admiral William Fallon lost the showdown for control of Central Command, the generals that remained—including Admiral Mike Mullen, now the Joint Chiefs chairman—were all aboard the Petraeus train; there’s nobody left but the long warriors. The way things look now, the Status of Forces agreement won’t amount to a speed bump on the road to eternal occupation of Iraq, and we’ll continue to bury ourselves in the Bananastans whether we cook up a flimsy excuse to be there or not.

In a bizarre turn on the BBC comedy Yes, Minister, our State and Defense secretaries are little more than figureheads for the career military officers who have gained a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy. I recommended several weeks ago that Obama should order every officer from the full bird level up to submit a request to retire, but he may consider that politically untenable. And if he canned Hillary, oh, my: double, double, toil and trouble!

He can marginalize Hillary by encircling her with advisers and special envoys and such who report directly to him. Hopefully, by the end of Gates’s “year or so,” Virginia governor Tim Kaine will have been succeeded by a Democrat and can take Jim Webb’s Senate seat, freeing Webb to take over at Defense. The best way to “get rid” of King David may be to promote him to Joint Chiefs chairman. The chairman doesn’t have any command authority; he’s merely the president’s top uniformed military adviser. Obama can privately make it loud and clear that he expects Petraeus to have his ten-word advice memorandum to the Oval Office by 5 p.m. every tenth Friday, pronto.

With Petraeus neutralized, maybe—just maybe—Webb or someone like him can begin developing a new generation of generals who don’t believe that defending their country involves keeping it entangled in never ending, counterproductive wars that defeat its economy.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. –Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is it, then, that we are about to put more troops into a war we know is unwinnable and have no coherent objective for them to pursue?

President Obama announced on Feb. 17 that he will send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That’s just over half of the 30,000 troop escalation that’s been discussed in recent months. Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 troops on top on the 17,000 Obama has promised on top of the 32,000 already in Afghanistan. McKiernan says the pending escalation won’t be a “temporary force uplift.” He thinks we need to keep 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next three to four years. “We’ve got to put them in the right places,” he says; but he doesn’t appear to know where those places are.

As foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter tells us, Obama was ready to support the full 30,000 troop escalation, endorsed by Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus. A hunch must have told Obama to ask one more question, because he called McKiernan directly and asked him how he planned to use those additional 30,000 troops. McKiernan couldn’t give him a straight answer.

Obama’s hunch must have generated in a Jan. 28 meeting with the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. According to NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, Obama asked his service chiefs “What is the end game” in Afghanistan? His service chiefs replied, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”

In a related story, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports that Danielle Pietka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, worries that Afghanistan is a “war that we may walk away from.” This remark came at a Feb. 28 meeting of AEI, the neoconservatives’ home think tank. Tom Donnelly, AEI’s top analyst and former deputy executive director of the infamous Project for the New American Century, hammered the Obama team for “the dumbing down of Afghanistan strategy,” which is a phrase he appears to have stolen from fellow AEI and PNAC luminary Gary Schmitt. It’s hard to tell whether Donnelly and Schmitt know that their chambermaids Gates, Mullen, Petraeus and Kiernan, not team Obama, are the ones pushing for an escalation without knowing what they’re escalating to or what to do with the escalators. They don’t even know which escalators to send. According to the Washington Post, nobody has even decided what kinds of forces to deploy.

At the AEI hobnob, Fred Kagan—who was thought to be the principle architect of the surge until publicist Tom Ricks said the real architect was Petraeus’s pet ox Ray Odierno—expressed concern that the Obama administration is trying to “define success down.” One wonders what Kagan means by that since nobody at AEI, including him, has defined what success in Afghanistan would be at all. Schmitt slams the administration for bandying buzzwords like “realism,” “attainable,” and “end game.” How dare they?

According to Dreyfuss, Kagan hopes President Obama isn’t listening to any of that slacker talk about realistic goals. Kagan hopes Obama listens to Petraeus.

Petraeus is the guy who bribed everybody in Mosul, which went to heck in a handcar when he left. As general in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus armed the Shiite militias before he left. As top commander in Iraq, he bribed and armed all the Sunni militias before he left. Now Iraq is a more dangerous place than it was before we invaded, so we can never leave or things will go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein, and while things were better then, to go back to the way things were would be unacceptable after the hard work and sacrifice we’ve put in to make things the way they are now. As theater commander, Petraeus wants to repeat his “successful experiment” in Iraq by bribing and arming Afghan militias so we can never leave there either.

Yeah, Petraeus is just the guy we want Obama to listen to. Thanks for the tip, Freddie.

Obama should stop listening to whoever told him to commit 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Going along halfway with a stupid idea is twice as stupid as taking it hook, line and sinker. And Obama should rendition whoever told him it would be a good idea to step up the air strikes in Pakistan. What, we weren’t pushing enough locals into the arms of the militants as it was?

Our military’s senior officers are either unforgivably ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession or they’ve pawned their integrity for enduring job security through the “persistent conflict” of the “long war.” Whichever is the case, it’s time for a Stalin-esque purge of the Department of Defense. Every officer from the full bird level up should be ordered to submit a request to retire, and all DoD civilians with the word “secretary” in their titles need to submit a letter of resignation. Don’t worry that the folks next in line aren’t ready for greater responsibility. Ike was a light colonel when World War II broke out.

Note to the commander in chief: the people who tell you this is a bad idea are the ones you need to push out the hatch first.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

So why are they executing an Iraq-like “surge” of forces?

No, After You…

One senior U.S. military commander told the Post “We have no strategic plan. We never had one.” He was referring to the Bush administration’s Afghanistan program, but he might as well have been talking about Iraq and Iran and every other tentacle of Bush era foreign policy. The senior commander also said that Obama’s first order of business will be to “explain to the American people what the mission is” in Afghanistan. Obama will be hard pressed to explain what the mission is if he doesn’t have a strategy.

A December New York Times article stated that “Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban.” Arming local militias was only part of the “successful” experiment in Iraq. The larger part of the experiment involved bribing militias not to use the arms we gave them, a course of action that has further cemented the ostensible necessity for U.S. troops to stay in that country well beyond Obama’s promised 16 month deadline. The surge has been so successful that, after two years, it’s still in effect; we have several thousand more troops in Iraq than we did when the surge began in January 2007, and it still hasn’t produced its stated purpose of political unification. Maybe that’s okay. Objectives seem to have gone the way of the foreign policies of yesteryear.

The hero of the Iraq surge, General David Petraeus, is now in charge of Central Command, the area of responsibility that encompasses Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a November press conference at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Petraeus said that, “an overall effort is essential,” but declined to give details on what the effort might consist of.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, puts it bluntly: “In the end, I believe it will boil down to bribing people into joining militias.” He cautions, “How military effective [this is] going to be remains to be seen.”

Bribing militias to fight the Taliban won’t be effective at all if the Pentagon decides not to fight the Taliban. As analyst Gareth Porter notes, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his rear echelon military functionaries have already had months to develop a new strategy, and the bottle is still spinning. Some officers have suggested we shift from killing the Taliban to protecting the population (from the Taliban, I’m guessing). Other proposed strategies include offering the Taliban protection from international forces in Afghanistan if they agree to undertake peace negotiations, and many believe the only solution is to offer a share of political power to the Taliban, in which case—arguably, at least—we might not want to kill them at all.

Then, as in Iraq, we’ll have to stick around forever to make sure the militias we paid to kill the Taliban don’t kill them or turn on us. Of course, they probably won’t kill the Taliban if we don’t pay them to, and they pretty much can’t kill the Taliban if we don’t arm them, and they can’t turn on us if we leave; but what kind of strategy would that be?

Throw Soldiers at It

For all the machinations of the Bush administration, its standard operating procedure was quite simple, more of a tactic than a strategy. The closest analogy to it I can think of is ice hockey’s dump-and-chase play. Hockey teams with overwhelming speed and size don’t bother with coordinated maneuvers; they simply sling the puck into the opponent’s zone, skate after it, knock the other guys into the boards and try to slide the puck to an open teammate in front of the net. If the tactic doesn’t work, they just do it again, and again, and again. If the opponent scores, the dump-and-chase team shakes it off and goes back to dumping and chasing and never stops doing it.

It’s not long before all the dump-and-chase team knows how to do is dump and chase, and after a time it’s too late for them to relearn how to skate and pass and play as a team. The U.S. has been playing dump-and-chase since the end of World War II. The stronger and bigger and faster we got relative to everyone else, the more we played dump-and-chase, and the less effective armed force became as a tool of foreign policy. Rather than reexamine the efficacy of our methods, we merely invested in an ever more powerful but increasingly impotent military.

So it is that we invaded Iraq on fuzzy pretexts with no idea of what we’d do after we “won,” without even a way of determining we’d accomplished our mission other than hanging a sign behind our commander in chief that said we had.

We’re about to escalate yet another enigmatic war with no particular purpose in mind. Mr. Obama says Afghanistan is now the “central front on terror.” The central front has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran to Syria to North Korea to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan again. That’s a boatload of central fronts for a war that doesn’t have any front lines. I can’t wait to hear who Obama says the latest incarnation of Hitler is.

Obama says he wants to make sure Afghanistan “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” Nobody can actually launch an attack on much of anything from the mountains of Afghanistan. You can plan an attack from there, but you can plan an attack on the United States from a picnic blanket spread out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And oh yeah, the Taliban, whether we decide to kill them or not, had nothing to do with 9/11, and have no interest in being party to a second one, and wouldn’t be fighting us if we hadn’t pitched a tent city in their front yard.

I hope young Mr. Obama thinks good and hard before he decides to send more G.I.s to risk life and limb in a third world wasteland for no coherent reason. I grew sick from watching the last commander in chief treat our troops like hockey pucks.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.