Afghanistan Updates

Abdullah Abdullah, presidential challenger to Hamid Karzai, announced that he was quitting the runoff election. In a choked-up voice he cited concerns about increased violence in Afghanistan and outrage at the fraudulent election process. The election was canceled and Karzai was declared president.

More U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in October than in any month since that war began eight years ago. A suicide bombing by Taliban militants killed six U.N. staff, and Major General Mike Flynn, director of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal's headquarters in Kabul, warned that the number of insurgents in Afghanistan (many of whom were from other countries) was now between 19,000 and 27,000, a ten-fold increase since 2004. "I wouldn't say it's out of control right now," Flynn explained, "but this is a California wildfire and we're having to bring in firemen from New York." President Barack Obama caved to pressure from Congress and military contractors and passed a $680,000,000,000 defense bill.

Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama's special envoy to the region, termed "an American success story"), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now "one of the most dangerous provinces" in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters -- the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads -- went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.

Finally, the New York Times revealed that the President's alleged drug-kingpin brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, whom American officials regularly and piously denounce, is, in fact, a long-term paid agent of the CIA and its literal landlord in the southern city of Kandahar. If you were a Taliban propagandist, you couldn't make this stuff up.

(Adapted from Harper's and TomDispatch news updates.)

Hamid Karzai Needs To Rethink Afghanistan

Speaking alongside NATO's secretary-general, Karzai told a news conference in Kabul that his government's foreign partners should respect and honor his country's independence"Afghanistan ... will never be a puppet state," Karzai said.

"No, my arms and legs are not spastically twitching on hidden strings. Not not not!"

The elections were to be held August 20th, but Karzai brought them up to April 21st to improve his chances of remaining Mayor of Kabul. Even if he manages to get elected again, however, his reason for being there is already over. Team Obama has no apparent plan other than to huddle with counterinsurgency experts who use the basic population control metrics and time frames. These usually work out to be 600,000 soldiers for 8 more years. That's not a solution. It's a hallucination.

At this point the only guy capable of bringing order to Pashtunistan is war hero Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruler from 1996-2001. He's the guy who told BushCo to shove its pipeline someplace else than through his country. He is renowned by Pashtuns as a man of integrity, bravery, and faith. He hasn't been seen since the US bombed his house in 2001 and killed his 10-year old son, effectively ruining our diplomatic options, and he is "rumored" to be under the ISI's protection. It is he who commands his people's will, now more than ever, and his rep as the toughest mo-fo around is necessary for governing the rampantly corrupt, comically chaotic region.

Yes, I am advocating The Big Dee-Dee Mao, leaving it all to the wrath of the Taliban. Bombing more villages of the poorest people in the world, well you might better try and kill them all and these are not the folks you want to have a "Who's Toughest" contest with. They'll win every time, and they have.

Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films is going to interview people on the ground for a new documentary, "Rethinking Afghanistan." The upshot is of course that the US shouldn't send more soldiers in to worsen a bad situation, so that's predictable enough, but Robert will also be there right when the plastique is blowing up the fan. Anything could happen, he won't have the US military or a team of handlers to protect him and the spring thaw will bring out the roadside bombs. Robert is a truth-seeking missile and all he's asking for is $20 to buy some rocket fuel in exchange for a production credit on his movie.

Sounds like a good deal to me, because we sure need to Rethink Afghanistan.

"I Told Her Not To Call When I'm At The Office"

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, looks at his iPhone during an interview with Associated Press at his residence in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009. Zaeef spent almost four years in Guantanamo.

Afghanistan

Sister and little brother, selling vegetables north of Kabul.

In Case You Missed This

Crack U.S. Marine Unit Recalled After Afghan Deaths

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An elite U.S. Marine Corp unit accused of killing at least 10 Afghan civilians has been called home early after commanders decided they could no longer operate effectively, a spokesman said on Saturday.

The order to remove the 120-member unit came from Maj. General Francis Kearney, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East and central Asia, after local anger over the March 4 fighting hampered their mission.

``General Kearney assessed that the relationship was damaged to the point that the unit could not as effectively conduct counterinsurgency operations, so he moved them out,'' said spokesman Lt. Col. Lou Leto.

Afghan officials say U.S. Marines shot dead at least 10 people during fighting outside Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan. New York-based Human Rights Watch says between eight and 16 civilians were killed.

Hundreds protested against the U.S. military after the violence and President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident.

The U.S. military at the time cited a "complex'' Taliban ambush involving a suicide car bombing and gunfire in a populated area.

The military said the Marines, members of a highly trained special operations force, fired in self-defense and that 16 civilians died in the suicide raid and subsequent fighting. The group was several months into a six-month deployment.

The U.S. military has since opened an investigation into the deaths. Leto said that an investigating officer had visited the area to interview local people.

No provincial or central Afghan government official has confirmed the U.S. military's account that the convoy came under rebel attack.

Cheney OK after Afghan blast; 23 killed

Damn.

The Prince Of The Marshes

Rory Stewart, a former soldier, diplomat, and compulsive adventurer, took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad in early 2004, looking for a job and thinking he could make a difference. Pictured at right for his Washington Post interview last August, he has probably written the definitive, adamantinely enduring account of the fall of Iraq.

It's a journal of his efforts on behalf of the Coalition and Western traditions to establish a functioning, stable democracy. He worked not in Baghdad, but in the impoverished Shi'ite southern part of Iraq; most other books which have emerged from there focus foremost on the Green Zone's hocus-pocus: Imperial Life in the Emerald City, The Assassin's Gate, Blind into Baghdad, Hubris, and Fiasco are the stuff of key actors, dicta, and grand strategies. The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq is different. It's a journal of how average post-Saddam people refused to swallow the hubristic, undigestible, and hypocritically half-stuffed haggis which the US and returning British baked; how some of them tried, how all of them retched, and how so many of them have died.

A couple months back I read Rory's other little cocktail-napkin masterpiece, The Places in Between, about his envigorating, self-appointed 600-mile hike across Afghanistan while war rained down on the Taliban in the winter of 2002. He claimed to be a historian re-tracing the route the Emperor Babur, conqueror of India, took with his small band of exiled followers on their way to take power in Kabul. Immediately after hearing of its existence, I went and got it. While briefer than one of Sir Richard Burton's adventures, it was no less dangerous, no less abrading, and no less, for lack of a better term, adventurous. His prose is honest and spare, his reverence for the regional history and poetry at once geeky, deep, and profound.

Having finished The Prince of the Marshes last night in my quest to appraise the effects of the bodkin plunged deep in my nation's back, I believe it's the kind of book which cannot be well distilled into a few paragraphs in a blog post, odd since the thing itself naturally consists of words, albeit 400 or so pages of them. I have the distinct impression a painting, a quilt, or something like a Bayeux Tapestry would be better suited to convey the force and complexity of the devastation, the poignant, roiling, reckless tragedy of what of late has happened in Iraq, in concert to the conflicts reaching back, gyrating all the way back, in fact, to the very terrarium of our origins.

This young man, a Scot born in Britain's last remaining colony (Hong Kong), educated at Oxford, keenly fluent in history, a Foreign Office veteran of Malaysia and Kosovo, was the West's factotum, the governor of the two provinces which lay in the lap of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers...Maysan and Nasiriyah, which were Saddam's own unruly bete noirs and the cradles of civilization. In Nasiriyah stands the Ziggurat of Ur, and bandits loot 7,000 year old pottery there along with the copper wire of high-tension power lines. Rory's story of governing is a travelogue which doles out history human being by human being, observing each from the tawdry ground level.

When people in the future wish to examine where not one, but two, Empires went in all probability terminally wrong, they will reach first for this book, much like they do for Lawrence's 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' when they seek to read of the Ottoman Empire's fall in Arabia. It trumps all other accounts with its understanding, or at least its abiding contemplation, of the human condition. I will be quoting from it with some regularity. Both books reduce the world to a human scale, using their art, foibles, sacrifices, principles, aspirations, and needs as rich holographs for the abstractions of princes, states, rulers, and Machiavellian crafts.