With the Qur’an-burning scandal, the Panjwai massacre, repeated demonstrations against the United States, and Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai’s increasingly strident anti-American pronouncements, it seems clear that the US is likely to be withdrawing from that country soon. The Obama administration, its “counter-insurgency” strategy crafted by current CIA head David Petraeus in flames, still hopes for a soft landing. Republican candidates have shown no appetite for staying in Afghanistan either (Newt Gingrich says that Afghans should be ‘left to their miserable lives,’ presumably as punishment for their ingratitude at being militarily occupied by the US and its western allies for over a decade).
I haven’t seen good recent reporting, however, on what seem to me the key elements in a successful US withdrawal, i.e. one that does not lead to another Afghan civil war, one that doesn’t leave the country a playground for regional interests, one that does not result in a takeover by the Taliban.
The centerpiece of US policy is the building up of the Afghanistan National Army, with a target set by President Obama of 260,000. This troop level cannot be sustained by the Afghan government budget, and so guarantees that foreign sources will be necessary to fund the army for years and perhaps decades to come. Is that course really plausible?
What is the current troop strength? How much of the country is the ANA responsible for now (the US and NATO have been turning provinces over to it one by one)? How many tanks does the ANA now have? How many helicopter gunships? What is the ethnic composition of the officer corps now? How loyal are they to Karzai? Who is the army chief of staff and how good is he?
Well, the easy part is that the army chief of staff is General Sher Mohammad Karimi, who is a very worried man. He was graduated from Britain’s prestigious Sandhurst military academy, but also studied in Egypt and Russia. He is worried about US hamfistedness, as with the scandal over the burning of the Qur’an, or the video of US troops pissing on fallen Taliban warriors’ bodies, and the way the Taliban are taking full propaganda advantage. He is worried about presiding over hundreds of thousands of largely illiterate, poorly trained troops (Afghanistan’s literacy rate is 28%, the troops’ literacy rate is about 10%).
Karimi is also concerned about the scaling down of US and NATO plans for support of his military, with recent maximum troop strength now being pegged at 230,000. He wants a bigger army and wants ongoing artillery and close air support.
All of these positions make me concerned about Karimi and the aftermath. He cannot possibly hope to depend on foreign rent so heavily, and on a gigantic, swollen army. If I were Karimi, I’d get NATO to buy me as many tanks and artillery pieces as they would right now, and train the men on them like crazy (for defense of main cities). More emphasis on light, mobile, forces backed by helicopter gunships for fighting in the more rugged areas is also necessary (for taking the fight to the enemy). It was only when the Soviets learned to fight that way that they even began to hold their own, back in the mid-1980s. (The Karzai government is fixated on getting F-16s fighter jets, which are useless for counter-insurgency.)
Depending on big Western aid budgets and Western close air support is unwise. Afghanistan in 2016 may not be a budget priority abroad. And the country cannot hope to support this enormous military establishment all by itself. It would swallow up the whole national budget.
The recruitment drive for the army had stalled out at 170,000 by last September. There were enormous numbers of troops going AWOL in 2010. The last figure I saw suggested that only two percent of the ANA is drawn from the provinces of Helmand and Qandahar, strongholds of the old Taliban. That kind of resistance to national integration could prove fatal, since even ANA troops therefore would look to locals like foreign occupiers.
It is the cohesiveness, efficiency, and counter-insurgency capabilities of the Afghanistan National Army that will go a long way toward determining the future of the country. We need more good reporting about what exactly is going on with the ANA.
What I can find out on the web suggests to me that the troops need more education. Why not a University of Maryland type educational program for them such as US GIs have access to? (Obviously in Afghanistan it would be elementary and high school education that most need). They need better armor and light aircraft and training on them. They need better esprit de corps. Karimi is excited about plans for a Sandhurst-style officer training academy in Kabul, but the quality and initiative of his fighting troops is just as important.
The US public is uninterested in or tired of Afghanistan. Obama should give up on a US-led attempt at counter-insurgency (winning hearts and minds, indeed) and instead put all its eggs in the basket of ensuring that the ANA and the national police have the capacity to do their jobs.
That capacity depends on perhaps a smaller but better trained and equipped force that is learning to act more independently. Karimi is playing the bureaucrat in a rentier state, expecting ongoing big money from outside sources. It isn’t likely to arrive. And his clear dependence on the US and NATO for back up and air support is unrealistic in the extreme. He needs to change his leadership style, or Afghanistan needs a different kind of military leader.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, under pressure from the Afghanistan government of Hamid Karzai to say something dramatic, brought up the possibility of the death penalty for the shooter. While it is important that Afghans feel that justice is done, Panetta is sidestepping a bigger issue.
The shooter was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, the leadership of which has a long history of prioritizing deployments over making sure that soldiers with brain injuries and possible Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are properly treated. The base has been plagued by suicides, spousal abuse, and soldiers going berserk abroad.
It should be remembered that frequency and duration of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan were substantially increased by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As a result of the Bush administration’s frenetic pursuit of multiple wars abroad, the small professional military of the US was put under enormous strain. Deployments were increased from a year to 18 months, and multiple deployments became common. Because of the prevalence of roadside bombs as an insurgent weapon of choice, brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan sky-rocketed. The murky military occupations of countries where young US troops had little local knowledge produced paranoia and widespread Islamophobia, sometimes reinforced by evangelical hatemongering among the troops. British officers who served with Americans in Iraq were shocked and appalled at the sheer racism they often encountered among their US colleagues, complaining that Americans viewed locals as Untermenschen, a lesser race as the Nazis would have put it. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome often went untreated.
There is no ideal way to fight wars of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. But JBLC’s leadership clearly is not doing right by our men and women in uniform, and is thereby endangering not only them but also the hope for a soft landing for the US and NATO in Afghanistan.
The rogue staff sergeant snapped and did a horrible thing. But it is too soon to conclude that he was acting alone or that there wasn’t a vendetta between US troops at his forward operating base near Qandahar and the villagers he attacked. And it is way too soon for Panetta to put it all on him, and to decline to reconsider how the US deals with the horrible toll that war takes on those Americans sent to fight it.
If President Obama really can arrange for, as he says, the “tides of war” to recede, he is still left with a big task, of seeing to it that the veterans and their families are better served in the treatment of the less visible wounds they carry. While the Veterans Administration has improved in the past decade on these issues, mental health and brain injury treatment are still inadequate, both for service people and Vets.
Americans in general should rethink our policy of perpetual war and constant foreign intervention, of war as a standing industry with lobbies and paid-for TV spokesmen, purveyed by all the US news networks to keep us hooked on foreign deployments. War should be rare and a last resort. One thing Panetta got right is that the UN Charter should govern it, so that we can finally put the crimes of the Axis behind us as we move into the 21st century. War should either be for self-defense after an attack, or it should be to preserve dire threats to international order as deemed by the UN Security Council. Otherwise, it is not just a problem of a rogue sergeant, or of a rogue base. It will increasingly be a problem of a rogue nation.
This is one Afghanistan newspaper’s reaction today to the story of the massacre by a US staff sergeant of 16 villagers, including 9 children, near Qandahar. It is a medley of photographs of US troops in the country. Note that the source, Afghanpaper.com, in Dari Persian, is considered an “independent” news source by the US government; it is not a Taliban operation, and has usually been balanced. The headline is, “Let us be at least a little bit ashamed.”
The BBC is reporting that villagers are complaining that one of the victims was 2 years old. A woman wept, “They say they are Taliban. Are there any 2-year-old Taliban?” She said, “They are always setting dogs on us and helicopters circle at night.” The Taliban press in Afghanistan is giving the number of civilians killed as 45, and this sort of incident makes Taliban propaganda more credible to Afghans.
An Afghanistan expert asked me, “How was an armed soldier able to leave a well-defended US military base at 3 in the morning without being challenged?” “There is more,” he said darkly, “to this than meets the eye.” Another troubling question is whether it was wise to send this man on 3 Iraq rotations and one Afghan one. Wouldn’t that warp a person, that intensity of years-long combat?
The fairness or unfairness of the contextless collage below is irrelevant to its emotional impact on Afghans whose sense of national sovereignty is being injured by the more-than-a-decade US occupation of their country. Going into homes where there are unveiled women, and exposing them to the gaze of 18 year old strange American men, is always going to anger Afghans. I’ve had US government people almost shout at me that such considerations cannot be allowed to come into play when you are doing counter-terrorism, that the chief thing is to find the weapons caches. But this kind of thing is why the Iraqi parliament voted the US troops right out of their country as soon as they could, and if the Afghan parliament had any real power, it would, too (some parliamentarians have already called for a jihad against the US over the Qur’an burning fiasco).
The Qur’an-burning scandal and this soldier going berserk are in many ways tangential to the Afghanistan War, but this does not mean they are unimportant. In the history of anti-colonial struggles (which is how the anti-US forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan see the war), almost accidental minor incidents frequently became rallying cry. The Dinshaway incident in Egypt in 1906 is a famous example. Some 13 years later there were hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in the streets demanding a British departure, which was achieved in 1922.
The US is hoping to be mostly out of Afghanistan by the end of 2013. But there is a plan for special forces to remain in the long term. The Peshawar-based Frontier Post calls this plan a “wild goose chase” for the US, and says it almost certainly doomed to failure.
Here is a mirror of the Afghanpaper.com newspaper page:
“Tomgram: Engelhardt and Turse, The End in Afghanistan?
Posted by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at 8:21am, February 28, 2012.
Blown Away
How the U.S. Fanned the Flames in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
Is it all over but the (anti-American) shouting — and the killing? Are the exits finally coming into view?
Sometimes, in a moment, the fog lifts, the clouds shift, and you can finally see the landscape ahead with startling clarity. In Afghanistan, Washington may be reaching that moment in a state of panic, horror, and confusion. Even as an anxious U.S. commander withdrew American and NATO advisors from Afghan ministries around Kabul last weekend — approximately 300, military spokesman James Williams tells TomDispatch — the ability of American soldiers to remain on giant fortified bases eating pizza and fried chicken into the distant future is not in doubt.
No set of Taliban guerrillas, suicide bombers, or armed Afghan “allies” turning their guns on their American “brothers” can alter that — not as long as Washington is ready to bring the necessary supplies into semi-blockaded Afghanistan at staggering cost. But sometimes that’s the least of the matter, not the essence of it. So if you’re in a mood to mark your calendars, late February 2012 may be the moment when the end game for America’s second Afghan War, launched in October 2001, was initially glimpsed.
Amid the reportage about the recent explosion of Afghan anger over the torching of Korans in a burn pit at Bagram Air Base, there was a tiny news item that caught the spirit of the moment. As anti-American protests (and the deaths of protestors) mounted across Afghanistan, the German military made a sudden decision to immediately abandon a 50-man outpost in the north of the country.
True, they had planned to leave it a few weeks later, but consider the move a tiny sign of the increasing itchiness of Washington’s NATO allies. The French have shown a similar inclination to leave town since, earlier this year, four of their troops were blown away (and 16 wounded) by an Afghan army soldier, as three others had been shot down several weeks before by another Afghan in uniform. Both the French and the Germans have also withdrawn their civilian advisors from Afghan government institutions in the wake of the latest unrest.
Now, it’s clear enough: the Europeans are ready to go. And that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, we’re talking about NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — whose soldiers found themselves in distant Afghanistan in the first place only because, since World War II, with the singular exception of French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, European leaders have had a terrible time saying “no” to Washington. They still can’t quite do so, but in these last months it’s clear which way their feet are pointed.
Which makes sense. You would have to be blind not to notice that the American effort in Afghanistan is heading into the tank.
The surprising thing is only that the Obama administration, which recently began to show a certain itchiness of its own — speeding up withdrawal dates and lowering the number of forces left behind — remains remarkably mired in its growing Afghan disaster. Besieged by demonstrators there, and at home by Republican presidential hopefuls making hay out of a situation from hell, its room to maneuver in an unraveling, increasingly chaotic situation seems to grow more limited by the day.
Sensitivity Training
The Afghan War shouldn’t be the world’s most complicated subject to deal with. After all, the message is clear enough. Eleven years in, if your forces are still burning Korans in a deeply religious Muslim country, it’s way too late and you should go.
Instead, the U.S. command in Kabul and the administration back home have proceeded to tie themselves in a series of bizarre knots, issuing apologies, orders, and threats to no particular purpose as events escalated. Soon after the news of the Koran burning broke, for instance, General John R. Allen, the U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, issued orders that couldn’t have been grimmer (or more feeble) under the circumstances. Only a decade late, he directed that all U.S. military personnel in the country undergo 10 days of sensitivity “training in the proper handling of religious materials.”
Sensitivity, in case you hadn’t noticed at this late date, has not been an American strong suit there. In the headlines in the last year, for instance, were revelations about the 12-soldier “kill team” that “hunted” Afghan civilians “for sport,” murdered them, and posed for demeaning photos with their corpses. There were the four wisecracking U.S. Marines who videotaped themselves urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans — whether civilians or Taliban guerrillas is unknown — with commentary (“Have a good day, buddy… Golden — like a shower”). There was also that sniper unit proudly sporting a Nazi SS banner in another photographed incident and the U.S. combat outpost named “Aryan.” And not to leave out the allies, there were the British soldiers who were filmed “abusing” children.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Afghans have often experienced the American and NATO occupation of these last years. To take but one example that recently caused outrage, there were the eight shepherd boys, aged six to 18, slaughtered in a NATO air strike in Kapisa Province in northern Afghanistan (with the usual apology and forthcoming “investigation,” as well as claims, denied by Afghans who also investigated, that the boys were armed).
More generally, there are the hated night raids launched by special operations forces that break into Afghan homes, cross cultural boundaries of every sort, and sometimes leave death in their wake. Like errant American and NATO air operations, which have been commonplace in these war years, they are reportedly deeply despised by most Afghans.
All of these, in turn, have been protested again and again by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. He has regularly demanded that the U.S. military cease them (or bring them under Afghan control). Being the president of Afghanistan, however, he has limited leverage and so American officials have paid little attention to his complaints or his sense of what Afghans were willing to take.
The protests in Afghanistan over the burning of old copies of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, by the US military at Bagram Base in Afghanistan, continued this weekend, with new violence.
This volatile situation, in which US troops are being wounded or killed, explains Presidnt Obama’s apology for the mishandling of the Qur’an. In contrast, Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum have slammed Obama for apologizing. Santorum called the gesture weak. (This stance is sheer hypocrisy from someone who has complained that Obama is ‘waging war on religion’ !)
On Sunday, Afghans threw grenades onto a US forward operating base in Kunduz Province in the north of the country, at Imam Sahib, wounding 7 special operations troops. Others attacked the police station in the town.
The Taliban have announced that the attacks are retaliation for the mishandling of the Qur’an.
Some 30 Afghans have died in demonstrations in recent days.
Two US military advisers to the Ministry of the Interior were shot dead on Saturday by an Afghan security man.
It turns out, according to recovered security tapes, that they were watching footage of the protests and cursing out the protesters, then speaking badly of the Qur’an. The Afghan argued with them that they should be more respectful, and when the argument escalated, he drew on them and shot them both dead.
If this story is true, it distills the arrogance and bigotry of some US personnel in Afghanistan (they are in someone else’s country). They didn’t deserve to meet that end, but cursing the Qur’an in a Muslim country in front of a local Muslim is about the most foolhardy act I can imagine. The strong evangelical element in some parts of the US military makes it particularly unsuited to more or less running a largely illiterate Muslim nation that is deeply religious. Evangelicals are the American group that has the highest disapproval of Islam.. (Doubt has been cast on this report. I was sent the informed comment below:
You mentioned on your facebook page that you had heard rumors that the two officers who were shot by someone in the Afghan HQ in Kabul had been trash-talking the muslims and their religion before being shot. Although reports are far from complete, from what I have seen from various sources, this seems to be a rubbish rumor. One of the reports that I have seen notes that one of the officers was a Pasto speaker and was very familiar with the Afghan culture and had been selected for assignment to this HQ on that basis. The other guy was a teacher in civilian life in Baltimore County Maryland and it seems highly unlikely that a guy with a racist outlook could be employed in the local schools. Further, the reports all appear to be suggesting that they were shot by someone who can into their secure area because the killer had an access code to their room and the suggestion is that he was not in the room prior to opening the door and shooting them…. There will be more information to come out, but I thought that you might want to update your facebook page since the negative rumors about the two officers are highly unlikely to prove true…..
Not only has the controversy roiled US and NATO relations with Afghanistan, it has implications farther afield.
Iranian preachers and Revolutionary Guards have been condemning the US vehemently over the burning. The US and Iran are competing for the affection of countries in the Muslim world, and the US military just lost much of its credibility there.
Newpaper editorials from Indonesia to Suadi Arabia are condemning the US.
Even in Iraq, from which US troops just withdrew in December, the major religious parties, even ones that had been friendly to Washington during the US presence there, took potshots at the US. (see below).
The USG Open Source Center also translated these passages from Iraqi religious parties, both Sunni and Shiite, slamming the US:
Iraqi Scholars, Leaders Condemn Koran Burning in Afghanistan, Reject US Apology
Iraq — OSC Summary
Friday, February 24, 2012 …
Iraqi websites between 22 February and 24 February were observed to post the following reports in response to 21 February reports of burning the Koran in the Bagram military base in Afghanistan.
On 24 February, Al-Sumariyah News cited a statement by the Kurdistan Region Presidency as saying: “We at the Kurdistan Region Presidency strongly condemn the burning of the holy Koran by US soldiers.” The statement added that “we hope that the officials at the Bagram military base will hold thorough investigations with those who carried out this disgraceful act and will not allow their irresponsible act to become a reason for sabotaging and threatening the situation in the Islamic world.” (Beirut Al-Sumariyah News in Arabic – Iraqi news website affiliated with Al-Sumariyah Television, a privately owned, primarily entertainment Iraqi satellite television, providing balanced coverage political issues in Iraq…)
Newt Gingrich continued to put his entire lack of logic on display on Thursday, when he criticized President Obama for apologizing for the desecration of the Qur’an at Bagram Base. Gingrich said Obama had not similarly sought an apology from Afghan president Hamid Karzai for the killing of two US soldiers by a uniformed Afghanistan National Army soldier.
But Obama’s apology was intended to prevent more US troops from being killed. And Gingrich has no idea if Karzai sent behind the scene apologies for the US soldiers’ deaths.
The US military holds Qur’ans at Bagram because they are distributed to captured Taliban in the cells there. It is alleged that inmates were writing on the pages and passing them on as a way of spreading radical notions or suggesting means of escape. The old Qur’ans were sent to be disposed of, but whoever was in charge did not know that burning old Qur’ans is sacrilegious.
In Afghanistan, old Qur’ans are either to be preserved in an attic, or if disposed of should be buried or allowed to float away in a river. Afghans are much more reverent toward the physical Qur’an than is typical in the Arab world.
The reason for which Obama apologized in Afghanistan has to do with the danger that eventually more will be killed if the demonstrations are not tamped down. There are tens of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan on a counter-insurgency mission that involves, in part, winning hearts and minds.
By loudly complaining in this way Gingrich is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The Taliban are already calling for US troops to be targeted, and when people hear Gingrich on the radio saying that the apology was wrong, it might provoke a new round of demonstrations.
It is Gingrich who should apologize. It is despicable that he should play politics with the lives of US troops.
The USG Open Source Center paraphrases Arab satellite television reports on the protests in Afghanistan of the incineration of Qur’ans by the US military.
FYI — Al-Jazirah, Al-Arabiyah Coverage of Koran Burning in Afghanistan (1)
Middle East — OSC Summary
Thursday, February 23, 2012 …
Al-Jazirah
Doha Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic coverage of the Koran burning in Afghanistan on 21, 22, and 23 February was mostly factual in brief announcer-read reports over video, sometimes followed by satellite interviews with the channel’s correspondent in Kabul Bakr Yunus for updates on the protests, causalities of the protests, and reactions of the Afghans toward the US apology and promise to investigate the incident.
The incident was not among the news headlines, did not lead any newscast, and was not carried in every newscast in line with the channels past behavior on major events. It was always carried around halfway through the news or toward the end of the newscast. Other than the channel’s correspondent, Al-Jazirah did not interview any analyst for comment.
Although announcer-read reports noted the apology of the White House, US secretary of defense, and ISAF commander, correspondent Bakr Yunus noted in his reports and interviews that “the mistakes and apologies of the foreign forces are repeated time and again; meanwhile, popular anger increases.”
He also mentioned in an interview carried at 1237 GMT on 22 February that“Afghan parliamentarians called on mosque preachers to declare jihad against the foreign forces.”
In an interview carried at 0917 GMT on 23 February, Bakr Yunus said that “Taliban called on the Afghans to target foreign military bases and to track foreigners and to kill them.”
He explained that the Koran copies were burned because some inmates in the military base used the pages of the books to write messages to prisoners in other cells.
A short report carried at 1303 GMT on 23 February said that an Afghan soldier opened fire killing two US soldiers in Afghanistan. In the interview with the channel’s correspondent which followed the short report, Bakr Yunus noted that the US officials’ “apology did not yield any result, especially since the Afghans think that the apology by the US forces means that they admitted to the incident. According to the Afghans, these forces are testing Afghans’ strength and patience in the face of US violations.” He highlighted “concerns over the Afghan Government’s ability to control the Afghan people and protesters tomorrow.”
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