The fresh combat troops, the two-star general for the Pakistan border regions, the drug-fighting tactics borrowed from Columbia and Mexico, the outreach to so-called moderate Taliban, the $7.5 billion thrown into Pakistan, the proposal to work around the catastrophically corrupt narco-lords in Kabul, the refusal to challenge the rentier tyro Hamid Karzai, and the endless patter about developing Pakistan -- all of this is talk, cash, fantasy and State Department trivialities invented at Brookings that makes up the new plan for Afghanistan. Smart diplomacy. Brainy combat. Genius grit discovered by Candidate Obama in his July 2008 stopover for a photo op with Hamid Karzai (above). I am momentarily impatient to list all the schemes now rolled out as if the Obama administration has decided it is not significant to read over how the British rode into the Swat Valley for decades in order to solve Afghanistan. You will recall that Sherlock Holmes's Dr. Watson was roughed up in Afghanistan. And that young Winston Churchill charged into the Swat Valley. The fact is that there is no solution in Afghanistan because the rot is entirely and only the superstitious, self-indulgent, bloody-minded and cowardly Pashtuns. I speak to Ann Marlowe on Sunday 29, who writes in Forbes.com that the endless turmoil in Afghanistan is a gang war between two clans of the Pashtuns. Altogether the Pashtuns are only about 4 in 10 of the population; however in their arrogance and cruelty the Pashtuns dominate the country. The Taliban are all Pashtun, but all from just one clan. Karzai is the other clan. The lightbulb illuminates. Afghanistan is the Mullah Mouse That Roared. Entice Britain and Russia and America to enter to solve what is believed to be anarchy, and then milk the empires. It is not anarchy. It is a vigorous family feud with a practical eye on the cash flow. Ann Marlowe is blunt:
The insurgency is first and foremost an intra-Pashtun power struggle. As Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason ably pointed out in the journal Orbis in 2007, Mullah Omar and most of the Taliban leadership are of the Hotaki Ghilzai tribal group. Almost all Taliban are members of the Ghilzai confederation. The Ghilzai and the Durranis--the tribal confederation to which the King and President Hamid Karzai belong--have been bitter rivals for hundreds of years, with the Ghilzais being odd man out for most of that time. Even now, they are poorly represented in Karzai's cabinet and in governorships in the Pashtun provinces.
Laughing at the Obama Team Holbrooke.
What will happen next in Afghanistan is that Pakistan will discover that the more it claims to be part of the solution, the more money will flow to maintain it as part of the problem. And the more it can watch itself on TV from America (right, watching the inauguration speech from Kabul). The Obama administration now proposes to conquer the Taliban by invading the suicidal bankrupt Pakistan and taking on the opium trade with DEA tricks. Richard Holbrooke is the special envoy from Mrs. Clinton's State Department. I am told by Forbes.com Tunku Varadarajan, who will join me along with Ann Marlowe on Sunday 29, that Richard Holbrooke is a challenging colleague, as in vain, self-involved, cunning, opaque. It is critical never to laugh at Richard Holbrooke. Never laugh. It is Mr. Holbrooke's solemn task to bring peace to a severely unlucky part of the world that has not been at peace since Homo erectus arrived. It has not come to the Obama administration that the practiced deceivers who could handle just fine Islamabad and the Pakistan Jihadists all live in Delhi and Mumbai and so forth. Set a fire to stop a fire. Instead, we are going to watch for a few years while the Obama administration rediscovers what a problem allies can be when led by the Diem brothers and when dominated by local family feuds and aimless revenge killings.
America's Achilles heel is what it has always been: arrogance. It does not mean we're necessarily bad people. It just means that that we think that by virtue of our pots of money, we can buy anybody and solve any problem. It would never occur to us that the rest of the world has got us figured out and might be gaming us.
Obama looks at the ledgers and sees gallons of red ink. So, he takes a page from Reagan's book and devises an elaborate scheme intended to make everybody believe that we remain flush as ever. In this way, he hopes to save himself the trouble of devising new strategies in dealing with others; strategies that might in the long run be far more effective but which nevertheless would have the potential of exposing our flanks. Worst of all, we might find that any new approach (in Afghanistan and elsewhere) would put us on par with our enemies, therefore leaving any eventual outcome in doubt.
London Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5993094.ece
Hopes in Washington that Karzai would be removed in elections this August are fading, as the opposition has failed to rally behind a single candidate. “We might not like Karzai but we’re probably going to have to live with him,” said a US official in Kabul.
Obama has nominated as his new ambassador to Kabul General Karl Eikenberry, a former commander of troops in Afghanistan, who has good relations with Karzai.
Obama did not repeat the words “exit strategy”, which he had used in an interview with CBS last week. But it is clear that far from spreading democracy, he has a more limited objective aimed at getting his troops out.
He hopes to do this by handing over control to Afghan security forces, increasing the size of the Afghan national army from 83,000 to 134,000 and the Afghan police to 82,000 by 2011, then further doubling them. Most experts regard these figures as highly ambitious. Nor is it just a question of numbers. More than two-thirds of the police are illiterate and they are responsible for much of the corruption in Afghanistan.
Those involved in drawing up the new strategy admit that training the new army will cost $3 billion a year – more than double the entire budget for the Afghan government.
Obama: Pakistan is now part of our war
Better watch once than a lot of time to read.
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The successful Petraeus "surge" in Iraq was based in large part on a more accurate understanding of, and effective appeal to, the key tribal structures and values in that country than had informed our policies there over the previous several years. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration's new Afghanistan and Pakistan policies apparently lack a similar understanding; as a result, they have much in common with our disastrous pre-surge Iraqi policies and will likely produce the same results -- failure.
Use previous video with care, my security deemed it having a Trojan program. Don't know if it correct
Are we going to ask Iran to use their airspace and overland routes to supply the troops in Afgha?
Sounds like a good plan.What you say they agree for humanitarian aid to flow, but, no weapons, ammunition, or fighting machines?
Then again, they could obfuscate, confiscate, and obliterate. Who knows?