Comments on: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

By: jerseyfresh

jerseyfresh — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:07:49 +0000

I realize I’m late to respond but, as a member of the “reality-based community,” I’d like to inject, you know, a little reality, into the debate over whether “the surge worked”:

Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery.

I also trust the word of Juan Cole — an actual Middle East expert — over some hipster-blogger eager to become a respectable liberal foreign policy pundit by heaping praise on the U.S. military’s “population-protection strategy.”

By: macaquerman

macaquerman — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:27:59 +0000

I was being a little flip. I will rephrase, but I wasn’t thinking suburban. I was thinking inner-city housing project where the population has been left undefended against predation.
But what I was struggling to say was that this program sounds more like an effort to help people
find a way out from being whipsawed by the Taliban and the corrupt, weak Afghani gov’t.
Build a communication net to help end the isolation imposed by the terrain. Get people to stand up, and if they call for help, have that help be rapidly provided by Americans.
Have the program based locally rather than nationally because there aren’t national leaders worthy of trust.

By: Endymion

Endymion — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:07:44 +0000

First, there is a sense of nationalism in Afghanistan that goes beyond tribalism, mostly centered around fallen leaders, religion, and an abundance of people with ties to multiple factions. There is no concerted movement towards genocide in Afghanistan. Second, citing historical military failures in Afghanistan as proof that all military interventions in Afghanistan must fail is fallacious. Afghanistan has been successfully fought in the past(or else there would be no Durand Line); and moreover, when the Soviets failed they were attacking an emerging developing country with a growing infrastructure and high social density, but we are fighting something altogether different: an exhausted country that has experienced nationwide violence almost every year for the past thirty and a society hollowed out by desperation.

By: Spencer Ackerman

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:05:03 +0000

“Neighborhood watch” program? This isn’t a suburban community we’re talking about. Beware the combination of euphemism and improper parallel.

By: csp1

csp1 — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:04:03 +0000

Holy shit! Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazeris may fight the Pashtuns in A-stan. A civil war! Stop the presses.

Scratch that. These tribes have been fighting each other for centuries and the United States can do nothing more to stop it than a college police force can stamp out “binge drinking.”

Liberal Internationalists to the rescue.

You need to read some Bacevich.

By: nitpicker

nitpicker — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:34:06 +0000

Here’s the problem with this whole deal: Unlike Iraq, which had a strong central leadership (to say the least) under Saddam, Afghanistan after the Russian war evolved into a country made up of the fiefdoms of former Mujahideen warlords. Rather than deal with that issue head-on and push those warlords to give up real power, the US and the Karzai government simply put governors in power locally and gave the most powerful warlords positions in government. The warlords, however, didn’t have to give up any of the money they’d swiped from their citizens, though, so they remain de facto leaders in their regions.

If you doubt this, go to Herat and check out all the paintings of Ismail Khan on the sides of buildings, including the mosque on the hill below the Governor’s mansion. I once watched an American lieutenant colonel chat with a sheriff in that area about the rule of law and the need to embrace the new government while a row of pictures of Khan looked down from the wall of the sheriff’s office.

Trying to start local militias like they did in Iraq will only reinvigorate the warlords’ power. It’s a terrible idea.

By: macaquerman

macaquerman — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:55:13 +0000

Try this one. This plan is not like Iraq. Go over the Filkins article again. Look at the small number of men being recruited. Note that they’re going to get brief training and then only small arms. And communications gear.
This aint a militia. It’s a neighborhood watch program.
You noted from over there that the police were few and totally corrupt. The population caught in a two-way squeeze.
The bad men come, who you gonna call?

911 comes to the land of 9/11

By: drip

drip — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:45:28 +0000

I think you were a little hard on yourself. The increase in troops was a factor in reducing certain types of violence but it was intended to allow the US to win (by some still to be announced standard) and leave. It did not do that. The global recession is limiting Iran’s influence. Does the surge take credit for that too?

By: jimportlandor

jimportlandor — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:40:35 +0000

I think I get the Pashtun v. others as a thread of reality. I’ve often wondered whether Afghanistan really is a nation, or whether the tribes of south and far eastern Afghan plus the tribes in Pakistan along the border are really a separate entity. Apparently the mountainous area between the two is no barrier to them and historically they are the backbone of complete rejection of outside forces. Damn those Brit map makers, again.

Every ethnic group seems to like the idea of “Afghanistan” as an entity, as long as they get to dominate and kill all of the others.

I don’t see how Karzai survives as leader, and if he does, it will consist of the government buildings in Kabul and little else.

I’m afraid Obama (and all of us) are going to get into a tar pit that is even worse than what the Russians had before the Taliban. At least the Russians had a clear path out via the north. We have no clear path to anywhere. Even resupply of our forces may become a critical item over the next year, since the tribes are trying to deny us access via Pakistan and seem to be succeeding.

Obama’s campaign emphasis on getting out of Iraq and beefing up Afghanistan was effective in blunting possible attacks that he was just a weak liberal, but the campaign is over now and I don’t see how we succeed in his plan. I expect NATO to begin to push for non-US troop withdrawals in ‘09 since the writing is on the wall that outsiders are not going to be tolerated much longer.

Somebody needs to think of how we escape Afghanistan with our dignity mostly intact before we are forced into the Russian/British humiliations in the past.

By: Spencer Ackerman

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:30:16 +0000

Yes, and I’ve written about all of that, way before the rest of the pack. The surge — better understood as the application of a population-protection strategy with additional US troops — contributed. Reality-based community, remember?