There is an old saying in military affairs, that everyone wants to do strategy and tactics, but real men do logistics. That is, moving persons and materiel around and managing supplies seems tedious, but they are crucial to success. The Obama administration has substituted the Logistics of War for the War on Terror. It is moving troops and equipment and assets around in the millions, on a vast scale, and therefore its enemies–whether the Sunni radicals in Iraq or the neo-Taliban, are also concentrating on logistics. The staccato, desultory news items of bombings here and air strikes there, make sense if the individual incidents are viewed as struggles over supply lines– whether supply lines for military purposes, or supplies of intangibles such as international legitimacy. And in this context, the gingerness with which Washington is now approaching Russia and Iran makes perfect sense.
The logistics war in AfPak were on full view Sunday, with the long fingers of blazing conflagrations jabbing the sky amidst billowing waves of jet black smoke both in Chaman in Pakistan near the Afghan border, and in Kunar Province. The bombing of supply trucks is to this war what u-boat attacks on supply ships were to the two world wars.
In Chaman, Dawn reports, “At least 15 oil tankers, trailers and containers caught fire in Chaman on Sunday night after a blast in a vehicle carrying supplies for Nato forces in Afghanistan.” The NATO supply vehicle became a sitting duck because the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been closed for the last few days over a dispute about whether Pakistani border guards may search Afghan fruit trucks.
Meanwhile, a different sort of supply line was hit in Mingora in the Swat valley, when a Taliban suicide bomber killed 16 recent police recruits and wounded 5 others. The Pakistani Army had attacked the 4,000 Taliban fighters that were dominating Swat this spring, much to the annoyance of the people of Swat, and had largely expelled them. But obviously furtive Taliban terrorist cells are still able to operate there, even against police stations. The point of these special operations police recruits was to make the expulsion of the Taliban permanent.
Both Hikmatyar and Jalal al-Din Haqqani were assets of the Reagan administration in the 1980s fight against the Soviets and they received large amounts of monetary aid from Washington, but have now turned on it.
In any case, the Taliban are obviously attempting to cut the supply routes that allow the US and NATO to keep their troops supplied with ammunition, fuel and food.
The hundreds of ballot fraud complaints now flooding into the offices of election monitors in Afghanistan threaten to deny legitimacy to the presidential election and thence to the Kabul government itself. In essence, the Obama administration and NATO intended those elections to form a supply line of international and domestic legitimacy, which has now been disrupted, apparently in some large part by partisans of President Karzai.
At the same time that NATO and the US are trying to move troops and materiel into Afghanistan, the US is attempting to move 1.5 million pieces of equipment out of Iraq, according to AP. Moreover, all but 40,000 US troops out of 130,000 now in country should be out by next year this time. Just as the supply trails into Afghanistan are vulnerable, so too are those out of Iraq. Much of the materiel is being put on trucks and taken south through Mahdi Army and Badr Corps (Shiite militia) territory to Kuwait in the south. Other trucks ply the once-perilous road between Baghdad and Aqaba in Jordan, going through sometimes hostile Sunni Arab territories. As the US forces and military equipment in Iraq dwindle, the remaining troops become more vulnerable.
As for the southern route, the major forces that can convince the armed Shiites to let the US leave in peace via Kuwait are the government of PM Nuri al-Maliki, which has been positioning the new Iraqi Army in the south and cultivating tribal levies there, and the Iranian government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Should relations take a very bad turn for the worse between the US and Iran, the danger of Shiite militia attacks on the US convoys would spike.
Also in Afghanistan, the US increasingly depends on Russian good will, and Iran is influential in Herat, Mazar, the Hazarah regions and Kabul. Iran can play a positive role in its two neighboring countries, de facto acting as an ally of the US. Or it could play spoiler.
The United States has been made a hostage to Iran and Russia by George W. Bush’s fooling miring of the US military in the midst of 300 million hostile, anti-imperialist Middle Easterners,
Obama’s presidency may succeed or flounder on his success in the recondite art of logistics, both in the strict military sense and in a wider metaphorical sense, of putting the right personnel and “assets” in place for political victories.
So I ask myself, why is Holbrooke in Karzai’s office insisting that there be a run-off? Wouldn’t whether there is a second round depend on the outcome of the election? Why try to persuade Karzai?
The only way this scenario makes sense to me is if US/NATO intelligence is reporting from the field that Karzai is rigging the election returns so as to ensure he gets to 50%.
The presidential election, which had been intended by Obama and his NATO allies as a political victory over the Taliban, is swiftly turning into a major debacle.
Voter turnout fell from some 70 percent in the last presidential election, likely to only 30-something percent this time (not the 50% initially estimated, presumably by someone with an interest in hyping the event for propaganda purposes). In some southern provinces such as Helmand, turnout was only 10 percent, a datum that demonstrates that the people of Helmand simply had no voice in this election and it does not meet international standards of legitimacy. (Voters must be held harmless from threats and violence).
‘ Sarwar Ahmadzai told a press conference in Kabul most of the rigging took place in Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul, Nangarhar, Laghman, Kunar, Nuristan, Logar, Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces. He accused supporters of Hamid Karzai and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah of involvement in irregularities. He said the rigging ranged from ballot box stuffing to voting by minors.’
Abdullah Abdullah has also alleged ballot fraud.
If Karzai is so widely suspected of stealing this election, why is there not the same global reaction against him as there was against Ahmadinejad in Iran? Is there an unwritten rule that allies of the West get cut some slack?
Many officials from NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan are fed up with Karzai, who, they say, says all the right things and makes promises but never delivers on them.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that he did not believe the leaders of Iran’s protesters against the official presidential election results were instigated by the West. He added, however, that the protesters had planned out their campaign even before the elections were held. (Since they could not have even known whether their candidate might have won, it is unlikely that they plotted out a whole social movement based on that contingency).
The supreme leader also cautioned that trials of dissidents should not be based on hearsay evidence but rather on solid evidence.
Khamenei was signalling to hard liners such as Ayatollah Misbah-Yazdi that he would not permit treason trials against the defeated presidential candidates or their supporters. Such actions have the potential to tear the country apart, and could well backfire on the regime as the show trials it is conducting against arrested protesters have already done.
In contrast, regime critics have not also backed down but rather have become if anything more vocal than ever. Grand Ayatollah Hosain Ali Montazeri more or less called Khamenei a dictator on Thursday. Montazeri has been marginalized and it may not matter so much what he says in a direct sort of way. But Montazeri was once Khomeini’s heir apparent, and that he is openly defying the supreme leader in thisway offers a powerful model to the dissidents.
Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei has made some extremely intemperate comments about the regime. He indicated disgust with the idea that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in according to Shiite formulas in a Shiite ceremony, and yet the whole thing was a fraud. He was disturbed. At one gathering he is said to have called Ahmadinejad a “bastard” (haramzadeh). He denies that the president was the referent.
The dissident politicians are still technically extremely weak. But it surely is significant that the one backpedaling on the severity of the charges was Khamenei, while his critics have grown more vociferous.
Meanwhile, the political turmoil in Iran, or perhaps a lack of the requisite raw materials, has thrown a wrench into Iran’s civilian nuclear energy research program. (Despite what the US and Israel keep alleging, there is no evidence that Iran has a weapons development project. At the moment, it is only able to enrich to about 4%, not good enough to run a reactor.
The big news in Iraq was the death from cancer in Tehran of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the clerical leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
He had been born in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf in 1950, into the household of Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, who served as the spiritual leader of Iraqi and most other non-Iranian Shiites in the 1960s. From 1968, when the secular Arab nationalist (and strongly Sunni-tinged) Baath Party made a coup and took over Iraq, it began persecuting Shiite activists. Many members of the al-Hakim clan were killed (over 60 by some counts), and others, including Abdul Aziz, were forced into exile in Iran.
In 1982, Ayatollah Khomeini formed the Iraqi expatriates into the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. In 1984, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim became the leader of it, with a goal of overthrowing Saddam and making Iraq into an Islamic republic. The younger brother, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, was put in charge of the Badr Corps, a guerrilla group based in Tehran that used to attack Iraqi government officials and facilities when the Baath Party was in power. (It was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, to which al-Hakim had a close relationship till his death).
He returned to Iraq in April of 2003, along with many Badr fighters. His older brother, Muhammad Baqir, was killed in a massive truck bombing in late August of 2003. Abdul Aziz became leader of the Supreme Council and Hadi al-Ameri took over the Badr Corps. Along with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and nuclear scientist Hussein Shahristani, he was an architect of the United Iraqi Alliance, a vast coalition of major and minor Shiite fundamentalist religious parties (along with some secular notables). The UIA went on to win the January 2005 parliamentary elections, and repeated that performance in December of that year. For some odd reason, conservative Republicans in the United States went wild with joy that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had become Iraq’s power broker. The Badr Corps, which he had headed, took over the special police commandos units of the Ministry of the Interior and gained a reputation for brutality against Sunni Arabs.
As Reidar Visser explains, Abdul Aziz maintained a close relationship with both Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and George W. Bush, showing the ways in which removing the Saddam Hussein regime and ensuring Shiite Arab dominance of Iraq were common goals of both Tehran and Washington. Al-Hakim repeatedly supported a long-term presence in Iraq of US troops, despite opposition to them on the part of most Iraqi and Iranian Shiites, because he feared that otherwise the Baathists would return. Sunni Arab guerrillas attempted to assassinate him on more than one occasion. He returned the favor, seeking to chase militant Sunnis out of the capital. He was frequently criticized by the Sunni Arab nationalist newspaper, al-Zaman, which he once threatened to muzzle. On the other hand, he did reach out to Sunnis, and Sunni parties expressed their condolences today.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim pushed for a Shiite provincial confederacy on the model of the Kurdistan Regional Government in the Shiite south, but voters there rebuffed him in January of 2009, rejecting any such plan. The plan was also opposed by the Islamic Mission Party of al-Maliki and that Sadr Movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr.
After al-Hakim fell ill with cancer and began spending most of his time in Iran undergoing treatment, the UIA coalition fell apart. A rival of the Supreme Council, the Islamic Mission Party or Da’wa, grew in strength, benefiting from the vigorous leadership of Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki (from spring 2006). Elements of the old Shiite coalition were put together again by other players this summer, with a new Iraqi National Alliance being announced just days ago. ISCI cleric and parliamentarian, Humam al-Hamudi, will chair the UIA coalition, succeeding al-Hakim. Al-Hamudi is known as a committed Shiite activist who played a major role in crafting Iraq’s constitution.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the eldest son of Abdul Aziz, Ammar al-Hakim, will lead the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) for the time being. Eventually the Consultative Council of ISCI will formally choose a successor. (It will probably be Ammar, though ISCI leader Jalal al-Din al-Saghir maintains that the choice could fall on someone else).
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat (The Middle East) reports in Arabic that the future of the new Shiite coalition, the Iraqi National Alliance, is shaky now that its leader is dead. Other observers doubted that things would change much on the ground, since Abdul Aziz was already on extended medical leave and all the arrangements were undertaken by his office.
The death of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim emblazons a question mark over Iraqi politics going forward. Important parliamentary elections are scheduled for January, and al-Hakim is not there to lead his own coalition to the polls. His son Ammar is still inexperienced and relatively young. The foremost figure in ISCI outside the al-Hakim family is probably Iraqi vice president Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is widely viewed as a pragmatist rather than a party activist.
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