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Robert McNamara's Memo To The Bush/Obama Hawks

By Steve Hynd

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam conflict, has died aged 93. Over at Hullabaloo, D-Day reminds us of McNamara's cautionary message for future U.S. leaders, comprising eleven causes and lessons he listed coming out of Vietnam.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

D-Day writes:

If this isn't an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don't know what is... I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Certainly in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan - and in their determination to pursue "strategic ambiguity" in the region over Iran - modern U.S. leaders seem hell-bent upon ignoring McNamara's hard-won wisdom.

Back in 2004, Douglas Saunders interviewed McNamara and asked him for his views on the Iraq invasion. The former SecDef was sure it was yet another massive mistake ignoring those 11 cautionary lessons.

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."

On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since "the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."

Obama's people are too busy reading Ricks, Nagl and Kilcullen to read Revelations, but the unshakeable certainty that America has the right and duty - the White Man's Burden by either divine mandate or through simple technocratic superiority - to re-shape other nations is still omnipresent.

Independence Day and Occupation

By Steve Hynd

Happy Fourth of July to our American Readers. As I've said before, as a lifelong voter for Scottish independence I'm jealous as hell.

But on your Independence Day it might be worth giving a few minutes thought to those your nation and mine occupy in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've been reduced to the role of "collateral damage", told they should be greatful for being bombed into submission to our edicts, denied basic rights such as habeas corpus in our foreign prisons, tortured and abused, exposed to our dumb belief in The White Man's Burden. Iraqis have finally managed to gain enough independence to tell us to butt out of their internal struggles, as we always should have.

Days earlier, Iraqis had celebrated the withdrawal of American forces from their cities as a "day of national sovereignty." And while Biden's visit was welcomed as evidence that the U.S. doesn't plan to completely disengage from Iraq, al-Maliki made it clear that he does not want U.S. officials to involve themselves as closely in Iraqi politics as they did in the past.

Al-Maliki told Biden that "the reconciliation issue is a purely Iraqi issue and any non-Iraqi involvement might have a negative effect," al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said. "We don't want the Americans to come and get involved."

But Afghans, citizens of a state which has no power to constrain our colonialism, don't have that luxury. This Independence Day I recommend reading  an op-ed by Rory Stewart, an ex-soldier and diplomat who is Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard. From 2000 to 2002 he walked solo across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey of 6000 miles, staying in villagers houses, and he has been the UK's Coalition Deputy Governor for two Iraqi provinces.

Rory Stewart's op-ed, The Irresistable Illusion, is available at the London Review of Books website (h/t Newshoggers' regular Geoff). Read it all, but here's a lengthy snippet.

Every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. The Communist government tried to tear down the old structures of mullah and khan; the anti-Soviet jihad set up new ones, bolstered with US and Saudi cash and weapons supplied from Pakistan. There is almost no economic activity in the country, aside from international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. The Afghan army cannot, like Pakistan’s, reject America’s attempt to define national security priorities; Afghan diplomats cannot mock our pronouncements. Karzai is widely criticised, but more than seven years after the invasion there is still no plausible alternative candidate; there aren’t even recognisable political parties.

Obama’s new policy has a very narrow focus – counter-terrorism – and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state. He presents this in a formal syllogism. The final goal in the region is

to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban because

if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban . . . that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

Such efforts are hampered by the nature of the Afghan economy and government. We must implement a counter-insurgency strategy, which includes

the deployment of 17,000 troops [to] take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east

but also adopt a more ‘comprehensive approach’, aiming to

promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.

Finally, Afghanistan cannot be addressed without addressing Pakistan:

To defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognise the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Or, in the pithier statement made by Obama last October:

In order to catch Osama bin Laden we have to win in Afghanistan and stabilise Pakistan.

Obama, then, combines a negative account of Afghanistan’s past and present – he describes the border region as ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ – with an optimism that it can be transformed. He assumes that we have a moral justification and obligation to intervene, that the US and its allies have the capacity to address the threat and that our global humanitarian and security objectives are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

...It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Yet the current state-building project, at the heart of our policy, is justified in the most instrumental terms – not as an end in itself but as a means towards counter-terrorism. Obama is clear about this:

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.

In pursuit of this objective, Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans. What kind of anti-terrorist tactics would we expect from the Afghan military? What kind of surveillance, interference and control from the police? We should not assume that the only way to achieve security in a developing country is through the restriction of civil liberties, or that authoritarianism is a necessary phase in state-formation, or a precondition for rapid economic development, or a lesser evil in the fight against modern terrorism.

After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative. It is particularly difficult to argue not for a total withdrawal but for a more cautious approach. The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Read the whole article. Seriously.

When Did The Af/Pak Policy Change?

By Steve Hynd

One of these things is not like the other.

Back in March, President Obama set out the broad outlines of his Af/Pak policy. One of the bright lines was supposedly that US forces in Afghanistan were not there to engage in long-term nation building. The US most definitely wasn't in Afghanistan so that in a decade or more at a cost of over a trillion dollars that nation could be bootstrapped up to the level of, say, Chad. Instead, the mission was twofold: to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban's hardcore militants, disrupting safe havens and killing leaders, while giving Afghans the bare beginnings of providing for their own governance and security.

In his March speech, Obama was plain that a long-term COIN operation wasn't to be on the cards and that the US "surge" was to take the fight to the Taliban.

We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists.

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

...I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border. This push will also help provide security in advance of the important presidential election in August.

At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.

Sometime over the last few months, that mission has changed. Without informing the American people and wthout any real debate, the COINdinista interventionists have taken over and redirected Obama's policy. From the WaPo today:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan…

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

Counter-insurgency "clear, hold and build" has entirely taken over from counter-terrorism "hunt, kill and disupt". That might be the right thing to do - although I have my doubts - but the point is that it wasn't what Obama said would happen and government policy has radically shifted in favor of an interventionist, long-war, nation-building policy straight from the military and the folks at CNAS without any official announcement or very much public debate. In fact, it's almost as if Obama himself hasn't been told.

Update: In comments over at VetVoice, commenter Ben says that one data point does not a trend make. Ben's critique correctly notes that there was going to be some COIN even in Obama's mainly CT-aimed original plan and so he asks how do might tell the difference from meagre evidence. But of course there isn't just one data point. There's been a continual stream of officers, wonks and policy officials - from Gates and McChrystal on down - saying that it's about civilian protection and nation building, not killing bad guys and getting out. The genesis of the change is easy to see too. CNAS' David Kilcullen has estimated another 10-15 years. Back in March, Eric Martin noted a CNAS report written by four of the leading COIN scholars arguing why a 5-10 year military/diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan was necessary.

Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal sees the same mission creep as I do.

And a new piece at The American Conservative details the alliance between Petraeus' COIN team and CNAS that has quietly changed Obama's Af/Pak policy.

Competing Strategies, Blind Faith In Af/Pak

By Steve Hynd

Bob Woodward's piece for the WaPo, in which he recounts national security advisor Jim Jones telling military leaders that any further calls for more troops in Afghanistan would occasion a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment" from Obama, has both COINdinistas and contraCOINers discussing prioritization of the (still benchmarkless) strategy's confusing components in Afghanistan.

Marine general Lawrence Nicholson is quoted by Woodward as having a mission of “Protect the populace by, with and through the ANSF,” where “killing the enemy is secondary.” By contrast, Obama back in his March Af/Pak stratergy speech said that "These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border." Pretty much everyone agrees that there aren't enough troops on the ground - whether they be U.S., allied or local Afghan forces - to cover all the bases; to both secure population centers in a COIN "clear, hold and build" operation and to go after the insurgency in its own rural and border territory. Something has to give - and it looks like it will be the latter.

No matter what Obama may have said in March, the military and the CNAS-propelled Obama administration foreign policy team have set the strategy as a COIN-based one. That means a loooong war, at a cost of upwards of a trillion, as the US pursues a chimerical dream whereby Afghanistan one day (no one will guess when) emerges as a nation where economic development and reconstruction defeat the Taliban, albeit with a heavy occupation presence of foreign troops. But will that presence be heavy enough? At the CNAS blog, "Ibn Muqawama" writes in a post entitled "Repeating Mistakes?" that insufficient force was what hampered Iraq all those years and that:

if we are committed to our current strategy in Afghanistan, it seems pretty darn important that we're confident we have the force levels necessary to establish that minimum level of security.  Otherwise our "civilian surge" and reconstruction initiatives seem likely to be DOA.  That's not a call for the administration to reflexively throw in more troops without a rigorous analysis of strategic costs and benefits, but it does suggest that it needs to double-check to ensure that its ends, ways, and means in Afghanistan are are all aligned.

Hang on, the "mistake" wasn't to try to make an invasion based on lies and a years-long occupation turn out a "victory" for US interests in the first place? Apparently not - for CNAS is neoliberal interventionism at its very worst. "Can we invade it? Yes we can!"  All of which leaves contraCOIN writer Michael Cohen very frustrated:

If I had my druthers the President would conduct ... a cost benefit analysis and come to the right conclusion that the currently stated mission in Afghanistan is worth neither the blood nor treasure that are needed for it to be successfully achieved. Instead he has chosen a muddled course that pretty much guarantees the US won't achieve his goals for Afghanistan. Personally, I think fighting a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is the modern equivalent of fighting a land war in Asia, but if that's the mission you decide upon then you have to give the military the resources to actually do it.

The President can't have it both ways. Either you fight the war in Afghanistan to achieve the mission you've laid out, or you don't. There isn't really a middle ground here. History provides a pretty good road map for how that usually works out.

In the end, this whole situation reminds me of another old military expression: FUBAR

But the "civilian surge" is already in trouble too. As my friend and COINdinista-with-misgivings Spencer Ackerman notes:

The so-called “civilian surge” into Afghanistan isn’t happening. Proposals earlier this year for hundreds of new U.S. civilian officials to deploy to Afghanistan have given way to “triage” attempts at getting smaller amounts of key civilian personnel into advisory capacities to bolster Afghan governance.

Even if the "civilian surge" was sorted out, though, the whole "population-centric" strategy is based on the idea that economic improvement, reconstruction and reconcilliation would mean that the Taliban would lose their foothold in Afghanistan and be unable to regain it either by bullet or ballot box afteroccupying forces (eventually) leave. There's no particular reason why this should be so and indeed real world evidence suggests that it's simply bulls**t, but it's taken as an article of blind faith by the COIN crowd. Neither Afghanistan or Pakistan are Iraq and the Taliban movement is not foreign in the way Al Qaeda was in Iraq. In fact, this blind faith underpinning of the entire COIN strategy for Af/Pak is most akin to believing, just because, that economic reconstruction and democracy would prevent the Sunni Arabs of Iraq ever again holding any kind of power in that country after US troops leave - a pretty unlikely proposition.

"Out, America out!"

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has a piece on the Iraqi celebrations I mentioned yesterday which are happening in advance of the formal pullout of US troops from their cities which is on schedule to conclude today.

"Out, America, out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

Across town, the virtual absence of American troops and helicopters, the cheerfulness of Iraqis in military uniform, and the cries of joy gave this scarred, bunkered capital a rare carnival-like atmosphere. Iraqi police and army cars were decked with ribbons, balloons, plastic flowers and new flags. A few Baghdadis drove under the sweltering midday sun honking horns as passengers hung out the windows waving flags and yelling euphorically.

In Basra, the sentiment was inscribed on walls with spray paint: "No No Americans." Another graffiti artist instructed: "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty."

Yet, despite the celebrations, as Spencer Ackerman points out, this is a withdrawal in name only.

Milestones don't always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence.

What these Iraqis are celebrating isn't this shadow of withdrawal, it's the idea of returned sovereignty, the concept of withdrawal. If I were Tom Friedman I'd probably write they were celebrating the platonic ideal of an end to their occupation.

Let's not forget that it is an accidental and mismanaged occupation -  one never planned for - which the whole world knows was born from outrageous lies. And that even so, as US officials and officers talked about helping Iraq find its feet again these past six years, they've continually betrayed those promises by looking out for often petty and mean U.S. national interests instead of Iraqis. Neither should we forget that there have been only minor convictions for all the brutality, torture and abuse, and mostly minor sentences even then.

But if Iraqis are celebrating the first flavor of an end to that occupation, they're not celebrating reconstruction or reconcilliation. They're not celebrating peace. Tom Ricks and others are correct that there will be a spiral of upward violence as the U.S. stiffener departs the Iraqi central government's backbone. (Although Ricks is a special case as he pleads that Petraeus and Odierno are geniuses for the Surge even while he argues the Surge didn't work.) There will be some level of civil war in Iraq yet, whether it's between Shia and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Shia money-grabbers in the oil-rich South or a combination of all three.

That's not an argument for extending the occupation, though. It was always an argument for shortening it. Imagine if the U.S. and it's allies had never invaded but an act of God or Alien Space Bats had destroyed Iraq's Saddam-era leadership, devastated the nation's infrastructure, killed thousands and displaced millions anyway. Of course there would have been a multi-sided civil war. Without Saddam's repression keeping a lid on and with those other stresses to society, the fractures and imbalances in Iraq would have split wide open exactly as they did - the only difference being no U.S. occupation to focus a goodly portion of those stresses upon, to magnify and perpetuate them. The same conditions will obtain after the US leaves, whenever that is, and would have obtained at any time in the last six years.

The point, blindingly obvious to jubilant Iraqis celebrating some meagre sovereignty today, is that all of that is their problem, never ours. The Pottery Barn Rule was never "you broke it, you own it". It was always meant to be "you broke it, pay for it, and get the f**k out of our store before you make things worse!"

Democrats' "radical, pro-war agenda" on anti-war money

By Steve Hynd

My friend Derrick Crowe, who blogs at Return Good For Evil and HuffPo, is pissed. He has a truly righteous rant today over the actions of Dem leaders on the Hill and at the White House, who have, he writes, sought to "wrap themselves in the flag" and jettison "the contrary arguments they employed during the last several cycles" in a shameful copying of past Republican tactics of pandering to the public for support for a pro-war agenda under cover of claiming to "support the troops".

Read the whole thing. Derrick points to the new DCCC ad campaign which mirrors previous GOP camapigns against principled anti-war Dems, and goes on to highlight how the Dems are using a heavy hand to browbeat their own anti-war members, threatening to ostracize and defund them unless the voted to fund Obama's continuation of Bush's wars. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) told the HuffPo that the White House and Dem leadership had threatened Dem freshmen "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," although an administration spokesman denied the charge. There were also rumors of about "Rahm Emanuel cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes" on the funding bill.

Thus, Derrick observes:

funds solicited from donors on the premise that they will be used to elect more Democrats and defeat more Republican incumbents are actually being used to ensure the election and incumbency of House members who will vote to support war funding.

As a prior Democratic donor and highly active volunteer, I am absolutely disgusted. I know I’m not alone.

And he concludes:

Incredibly, despite five policy reviews in six months, the President who ran on a platform of finishing the fight in Afghanistan presides over a military campaign now wandering into neighboring countries, adrift in the exhibition of qualities for which he once decried the policies of President Bush: “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

At moments like this, we desperately need a Congress and a congressional leadership team with the spine to check the listlessness and violence of the executive’s actions overseas. The actions of House leadership and their political campaign operation down the street have revealed that we have no such thing. Rather, what the war funding vote and its aftermath revealed is the further infiltration and dominance of the official structures the Democratic Party by a radical pro-war caucus, perfectly willing to sell out their constituents and their donors in the name of out-of-control militarism and continued, highly profitable mass murder overseas. This radical caucus running the party in the House flexed its muscles just this past week, teaming with Republicans to defeat legislative language to require an exit strategy from Afghanistan, despite the fact that the majority of rank-and-file Democrats supported it and despite its similarity to the exit strategy for which Democrats agitated for Iraq under President Bush. Until we force changes, expect more of the same on future votes.

I encourage every anti-war DCCC donor to close your checkbooks and put your debit cards away until we see a party worth another penny. Right now, the Democratic party isn’t. In fact, I’d like my money back.

Righteous.

Finally, A Sensible Af/Pak Opium Policy

By Steve Hynd

We've written a fair bit here about what we all believe to be Obama's disasterous non-plan for the Af/Pak region, a plan that is simply Bush-lite without a benchmark for progress in sight and without any kind of exit plan. But credit where it's due, the Obama administration has finally gotten something right.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication -- for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country -- was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

''Eradication is a waste of money,'' Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

''It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication,'' he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Instead, the US is to concentrate on assisting farmers who abandon poppy cultivation, boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops.

While Holbrooke did not provide the AP with a dollar figure for the new U.S. commitment, he told the G-8 ministers that Washington was increasing its funding for agricultural assistance from tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the current G-8 president.

''We're essentially phasing out our support for crop eradication and using the money to work on interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops,'' Holbrooke told the AP.

...The G-8 ministers along with Afghan counterpart Rangin Dadfar Spanta issued a statement at the end of their three-day summit Saturday saying it was urgent to find alternatives for farming communities where ''narco-trafficking and extremism are endemic.''

They said sustainable farming was key to Afghanistan's and Pakistan's future in that it would boost incomes, create jobs, improve rural development and lower regional tensions.

''Food insecurity and chronic poverty are root causes of civil instability and forced migration,'' the statement said.

As Fester noted back in December, US policies of eradication have been a disaster in Columbia too.

Newshoggers alumni Libby Spencer is happy with the policy change: "I could have written that statement. Come to think of it, I did -- too many times to count," but she, I'm sure, is aware that previous, lower key, promises of alternative crop development in Afghanistan have been plagued by a failure to follow through. Hopefully, now that these alternatives are official policy rather than piecemeal experiments, the funding and resourcing will come.

Obama, Like Bush, Wrong On Indefinite Detention

By Steve Hynd

A Pro-Publica report for the Washington Post which says that the Obama administration is drafting an executive order to reassert Bush's claimed presidential authority to lock up detainees forever without trial.

It's generating a lot of blogger comment, with rightwing posts being mostly along the lines of "see, we told you Bush was right" and leftwing posts being critical of Obama's plans and the very notion of indefinite detention.

The report is being described as a "trial balloon". Not to see if people will accept the idea of indefinite detentions - Obama has already said explicitly those will happen - but to see if doing an end-run around Congress to proclaim the right to do so by executive fiat will upset too many very important people.

I've nothing really to add to Glenn Greenwald's post on this report, and in particular this:

A government that will give you a trial before imprisoning you only where it knows ahead of time it will win -- and, where it doesn't know that, will just imprison you without a trial -- isn't a government that believes in due process.  It's one that believes in show trials.

This move is an abuse of authority and immoral at every level.

Obama has already foreited my (always sceptical) support - over his claims to secrecy, his abysmal Af/Pak non-plan, his denials of habeas rights and his continued torturing of the facts about Iran's nuclear program. My original fears have been proven justified, he's America's Tony Blair. Yes, he's better than John McCain or Hillary Clinton would have been in the Oval Office; that's a pretty low bar though, and not one that should garner progressives' uncritical support for a president who simply isn't very good at all.

The Wrong Kind Of Clear

By Steve Hynd

The counter-insurgency paradigm for Af/Pak, as it was for Iraq, is "clear, hold and build". We've seen often enough that this paradigm has hit problems in Iraq, particularly with the "build" part - corruption and graft stopping construction or a total failure of the effort to build reconcilliation between feuding factions. But British troops have found, in Afghanistan, a new flaw - this time in the "clear" portion of the COIN mantra. The locals, getting wind of a major British operation and knowing full well that the "collateral damage" this would entail would be inflicted on them and their children, got the hell out of Dodge and left the field entirely to the Taliban.

The aim was to claim a lawless part of Afghanistan's troublesome south for the distant and disliked government far away in Kabul. They would seize the area, put up fortifications to limit movement and impose some order and authority.

But, despite the strict secrecy that cloaked the operation, the local people seemed to have got wind of it and – scared by the prospect of intense fighting – voted with their feet.

The day before the soldiers began their operation, drones monitoring the area showed people evacuating their homes, leaving Babaji in the hands of militants.

During the first three days of their two-week stay in the area, which will end when troops from the Welsh Guards relieve them, the men of the Black Watch battalion endured persistent attacks of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. With the enemy hiding at a distance, in bushes and abandoned compounds, most soldiers never saw their foes. Only the snipers and the men monitoring the live video feeds from circling drones got sight of their quarry.

"They are so well camouflaged you can't see anything," said Rob Colquoun, a section leader, in charge of a team of snipers who killed 18 Afghans in one afternoon.

... "Running around, getting into fights and killing a few enemy is all very well and good, but my main concern at the moment is that we haven't talked to any local nationals or really got out our main message to the community that this time we are here to stay," said Major Steele.

If there's no-one there to "build" for, COIN's "clear, hold and build" doctrine has a problem.

The Brits eventually found an old man who hadn't evacuated with the rest and three senior officers promptly and comically descended upon him to do their "population centric" bit. He wasn't having any of it.

"Last year a big British bomb in Nowzad killed 600 people," he said. "Another 170 were killed at a wedding party."

..."I'm 80 years old and I have seen many governments and none of them have been any help. Why should I believe that this one will help?"

So the officers split for their forward operating base (FOB) before they could be attacked and take casualties. Later that day, the UK troops called in an American B-1 bomber to clear one guy out of a deserted compound which had been someone's home. It isn't just among US officers that FOBbit-based, casualty averse "force protection" instincts get in the way of "hearts and minds".

The Farah Airstrike Coverup

By Steve Hynd

A report by the UK's Channel Four News, via the Real News Network, alleges a coverup over May 4th airstrikes in Farah province, Afghanistan, which the US military says killed scores of Taliban fighters and "only" 26 civilians and local villagers say killed around 140 innocents. The report includes previously unseen footage, taken by a cellphone, showing at least a score of children's bodies recovered from the rubble.

The US military had originally tried to blame Taliban grenades for civilian casualties, despite the utter devestation caused by dropping 2,000 lb bombs. Villagers who survived insist that by the time the bombs fell the Taliban had already fled the area.

Gareth Porter also accuses the US military of "covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident", and for much the same reasons as the Channel Four report.

The declassified "executive summary" of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the "Taliban" – the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces - for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes.

...the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the "second B1-B strike" and the "third B-1B strike" caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes.

It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a "second large group" – again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian – indicated that they were "enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces" and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved.

The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well.

In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the "destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties". Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike – thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians.

The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was "another Taliban element". A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby.

Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any "Taliban" killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike.

By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes which killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning – that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximised.

Despite admissions that the military's own rules of engagement were not followed in the airstrikes - particularly in not checking whether targets were civilian or not, no one has been held culpable in any way. Yet by not checking, then bombing civilians, a clear war crime was committed.