Afghanistan — VOICES for REASON

If you haven’t yet checked out Elan Journo’s edited collection, Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism, this month you can read the introduction and first two chapters of the book for free here.

Winning the Unwinnable War analyzes U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since 9/11.

From the book’s introduction:

Chapter 1 [titled "The Road to 9/11"] demonstrates how unprincipled U.S. policy–from Carter through Clinton–worked to galvanize the enemy to bring its holy war to our shores on 9/11. Chapter 2 [titled "What Motivates the Jihad on America"] explores the widely evaded nature and goals of the enemy, and indicates how that should figure in America’s military response.

You can buy the book here.

It has been a decade since the Sept. 11 attacks shocked and angered our nation. What lessons have we learned since then? ARC will be hosting a symposium on this subject, titled “Sept. 11—A Decade Later: Lessons for the Future,” on September 8, in Washington, D.C. The program will feature three panel discussions, presenting a range of viewpoints.

If you can’t make this event, it will also be streamed live over the web starting at 1p.m. ET.

Check out the panel topics and speakers on the event’s site. You can also watch the live stream of the event from there.

On ARC’s Facebook page, you can read, watch, and listen to ARI’s numerous efforts throughout the last decade to push for an egoist foreign policy that puts the lives and individual rights of Americans first.

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Elan Journo.

• Disconnected Dots
• McChrystal’s other — deadly — scandal
• Draw Mohammad, risk your life?
• Iraq’s Awakening re-awakens pro-jihadist. Shocking.

image: cc/yoshiffles

This poll, if accurate, is truly damning — not only of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but also of Afghans’ ideas. Last year, some 8 percent of Afghans said that insurgent attacks on US/Nato forces can be justified. This year, twenty-seven percent of Afghans polled said the attacks can be justified.

What makes this three-fold increase so astounding is that it comes after continual ratcheting up of restrictions on when U.S. troops in Afghanistan are permitted to use deadly force. Our soldiers are far, far more limited in when they can call in air support, for example, than just a couple of years ago (when their hands were still fairly tied). Yet for years, the premise of our strategy has been that, the more we tiptoe, appease the locals, and pull our punches, the more likely we are to win the love of the population. But in fact, pursuing this self-crippled policy (as I note in my book) leads our enemies and their sympathizers to feel contempt, if not greater enmity, for us.

Notice, moreover, that there’s been 31 percent increase in civilian deaths in the first six months of the year — “largely caused by Taliban attacks, according to the United Nations” (casualties attributed to Western forces have declined). And yet, 73 percent favor a “negotiated settlement” with the totalitarian Taliban/Islamist groups.

What does that say about the ideological sympathies of Afghans? What does it say about the assumptions behind U.S. policy in the region?

Iran’s attempts to turn post-war Iraq into an Islamist vassal is a way under-reported story. For a long time, that narrative was downplayed, minimized, denied. No more, perhaps.

What comes into sharp focus in this New York Times report is a horrifying picture of Iran’s considerable efforts to dominate in Iraq. The NYT summary is long, but well worth reading. Despite our supposed “success” in Iraq, Iran’s power-grab persists. Just how many Americans have died in Iraq because of Iran’s backing of insurgent groups (both Sunni and Shiite) is hard to calculate; but Iran’s culpability and militant ambitions should no longer be in question.

Now Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has conceded that his administration has received payouts from the militant theocracy in Iran. To what end is Iran backing him? My assessment: To solidify Iranian influence and power over Afghanistan. (There was already evidence that Iran was backing certain Islamist forces in the country.)

Add these two data points to the Iranian regime’s decades-long rap sheet. This is a regime with which our current (and our former) president has sought a rapprochement? A more healthy relationship based on “mutual respect and mutual interests”? This is a regime ambitious to expand its Islamist dominion far and wide, by force. It has continually shown itself to be an aggressive enemy of America and our interests.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview has created a scandal–but the real scandal we should be talking about is his Afghanistan strategy and how it needlessly imperils American lives.

Under his widely acclaimed counterinsurgency strategy, McChrystal “shifted the risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants,” reports the NYT.  Translation: the rules place the lives and welfare of Afghans —  emphatically including the Islamist warriors we’re supposed to be fighting — ahead of American lives. Consider:

Before the rules were tightened, one Army major who had commanded an infantry company said, “firefights in Afghanistan had a half-life.” By this he meant that skirmishes often were brief, lasting roughly a half-hour. The Taliban would ambush patrols and typically break contact and slip away as patrol leaders organized and escalated Western firepower in response.

Now, with fire support often restricted, or even idled, Taliban fighters seem noticeably less worried about an American response, many soldiers and Marines say. Firefights often drag on, sometimes lasting hours, and costing lives. The United States’ material advantages are not robustly applied; troops are engaged in rifle-on-rifle fights on their enemy’s turf. [emphasis added]

I’ve argued in Winning the Unwinnable War and in talks around the country that this policy is self-crippling and morally perverse. And the policy is still in full-effect, as the experiences of soldiers on the ground can attest to.

Several infantrymen have also said that the rules are so restrictive that pilots are often not allowed to attack fixed targets — say, a building or tree line from which troops are taking fire — unless they can personally see the insurgents doing the firing.

This has lead to situations many soldiers describe as absurd, including decisions by patrol leaders to have fellow soldiers move briefly out into the open to draw fire once aircraft arrive, so the pilots might be cleared to participate in the fight. [emphasis added]

All of which confers an inestimable tactical advantage on Taliban fighters — “making it easier for them to hide to fight, to meet and to store their weapons or assemble their makeshift bombs.” Meanwhile, U.S. troops — with justified indignation — speak of “‘being handcuffed,’ of not being trusted by their bosses and of being asked to battle a canny and vicious insurgency ‘in a fair fight.’” How many more must return home in coffins, because they were purposely hamstrung in combat?

By all means, question McChrystal’s judgment in making derisive comments about his boss, the Commander in Chief. But isn’t it past time to question the propriety of an Afghan strategy that both endorse?

image: wiki commons

Later this week world leaders and diplomats will meet in London to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. In my earlier post I talked about the U.S.-Afghan drive to appease the Taliban; now, in the lead-up to the international conference, the NYT reports:

The leader of the United Nations mission here [Kabul] called on Afghan officials to seek the removal of at least some senior Taliban leaders from the United Nations’ list of terrorists, as a first step toward opening direct negotiations with the insurgent group.

What’s next, a plea-bargain for Osama bin Laden? That’s crazy talk, yes. But on 9/12/01, erasing Taliban fighters from terrorist watch lists would have sounded outlandish, too. Here we are, though, eight-plus years later, currying favor with enemies we have failed to defeat in the hopes they’ll deign to talk to us.

The Afghan government floated a new plan “offering jobs, security, education and other social benefits to Taliban followers who defect” in the hope of quelling, if not crippling, the Taliban-Islamist resurgence seeking to take over the country. The Islamist response? A massive, coordinated suicide attack on the presidential palace, ministry of justice and central bank in Kabul.

It was meant to deliver a message — which the Taliban’s spokesman put into words afterward: “We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal.”

Horrific scarcely begins to describe the attack, but there was ample reason to expect the baksheesh (bribes) to elicit that kind of response from the Islamists. There are many parallels you could draw, but take just one: the current U.S. approach toward Iran.

Read the rest of this entry »

A follow up to my post on Obama’s policy and “just war” doctrine: NPR ran a story Friday that eloquently illustrates how this approach undermines our military, how it (understandably) frustrates our troops, and how it needlessly exposes them to greater risks. The story describes a clear-cut incident where U.S. forces observed insurgents planting a road-side bomb, but under newly tightened, even more restrictive rules of engagement, the soldiers had to let them get away with it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report are the comments from Gen. Stanley McChryrstal who champions this approach and believes it will bring us success.

Listen to the audio (4m55s).

image: Flickr/dvids//CC BY 2.0

President Obama is weighing how to deal with the seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan, but have the right questions been asked about how we got to this point? In a post that I contributed to the blog of Rowman & Littlefield (the publisher of my book), I suggest that our policymakers (and all Americans) should re-think their assumptions about what went wrong in Afghanistan.