TW:
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
" The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by U.S. and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.
tweetmeme_source = 'politicsdaily';
In the short term, at least, that's the dismaying expectation of a wide range of counterinsurgency and Afghanistan experts if President Obama authorizes McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to implement a wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign with as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops. Pentagon and White House officials say that decision will be made within weeks.
The United States is likely to be badly bruised in the coming months no matter what strategy it adopts in Afghanistan, according to military and civilian experts, many of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the current strategic review. But between the extremes of making no change in war strategy, and cutting back troops and other resources, the McChrystal plan is said to entail the fewest -- but still significant -- dangers.
Most public attention has focused on the pending request by McChrystal for troop reinforcements. But more significant than the troop numbers is his blueprint for a radical shift in the way the United States and its allies intend to fight the war.
Key among his proposed changes: rather than trying to fight everywhere, shifting forces to "critical areas,'' where the Afghan population is most at risk. Another key change: getting American troops -- and increasing numbers of U.S. civilians -- out of their armored vehicles and fortified bases into Afghan communities, and getting them to shuck body armor and helmets and to walk among the population unprotected, like the Afghans themselves do.
"Once the risk is shared, effective force protection will come from the people,'' McChrystal wrote in the strategy proposal now under consideration at the White House. "Accepting some risk in the short term will ultimately save lives in the long run.''
But as the overworked yet accurate phrase in vogue at the Pentagon has it, "the enemy gets a vote.'' And this particular enemy, as the Jihadist fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, is highly adaptive, quick to learn to blunt the impact of American precision weapons and to emasculate the U.S. doctrine for mass conventional warfare. Cheap IEDs, for instance, have demolished the U.S. advantage in armored vehicles, field commanders say.
McChrystal and his top aides, together with a dozen counterinsurgency experts, put together the 66-page proposal for a new counterinsurgency strategy this summer – and then set up an aggressive "Red Team'' to play the Taliban, looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Satisfied that he knew the risks and found them acceptable, McChrystal sent the proposal on to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the White House.
Yet, the public may feel differently about the risks, especially in the short term. And that gives the Afghan insurgents a pressing motive to surge American casualties, to mount spectacularly bloody attacks, to impress on the American and European public the high cost of the campaign, analysts say.
"Nobody I know thinks this war can be won in a year or two years,'' said
Stephen Biddle, a senior analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of McChrystal's strategy brain trust. "You could certainly lose political support for the war in the U.S. much sooner than that.''
Politically savvy insurgents are familiar with that timeline. And, because it would take a year to get U.S. reinforcements in position, the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan will be at risk. The Taliban will respond with "a cheap campaign of IEDs, mortars and rocket and mortar attacks'' on clusters of U.S. troops, said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and counterinsurgency expert. Others expect the Taliban to deepen their infiltration of the Afghan army and national police force; already, insurgents have been discovered with Afghan police uniforms and vehicles. "You have one of them 'go postal' and kill an American – that just poisons the relationship between our military and their security forces,'' said David Isby, a Washington-based defense expert and author of several books on Afghanistan.
Experts also express worry that the insurgents yet could find a supply of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, perhaps from Iran, to use against troop-carrying cargo planes and helicopters, the lifeline of U.S. forces in the country.
Under the McChrystal campaign plan, some regions of Afghanistan would be left sparsely defended if at all, opening new opportunities for Taliban propaganda victories. Some senior U.S. military officers are worried about how to blunt powerful Taliban messages that would say, in effect, "Look, we forced the powerful Americans out and they have abandoned you, just like they abandoned Afghanistan before.'' There is concern as well about reprisal killings of Afghan police and others who cooperated with U.S. forces before they were withdrawn.
A Taliban "surge'' across large swaths of undefended rural Afghanistan would mirror the strategy they used in the mid-1990s in their successful sweep to power, building bases of support from one village and rural district to another while rival Afghan militias tried to defend large towns and cities. That strategy was "innovative and ruthlessly effective,'' Seth G. Jones of Georgetown University writes in a new book about the Afghan war, In the Graveyard of Empires.
"Afghanistan is fundamentally about legitimacy, and having the Taliban set up liberated zones would be huge,'' said Isby.
The largest Afghan insurgent group, the Quetta Shura Taliban, already has set up shadow governments in most Afghan provinces, complete with grievance boards, courts, tax levies and military conscription. U.S. officials say they have only a superficial knowledge of the depth and breadth of these networks.
Senior military officers also expressed concern that insurgents might use existing shadow networks in the major southern city of Kandahar or even in the capital, Kabul, to stage a spectacular attack similar to the 1968 Tet offensive. That was a surprising but largely bungled series of attacks across South Vietnam by Viet Cong insurgents. Although the insurgents suffered huge losses, scenes of fighting inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon and elsewhere shocked the American public and helped turn opinion against the war.
Even short of such drama, the costs of any Afghan war strategy, "to have any reasonable chance of success, are going to be high,'' said Biddle. He and others believe it will require a major effort by Obama and European leaders to convince the public on the necessity of accepting high up-front costs. "I suspect it will probably require a very systematic, deliberate attempt by the executive branch to make the case to the public'' he said, "that on balance, the costs are worth paying.''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/06/how-the-taliban-might-respond-to-mcchrysals-new-war-plan/
Showing posts with label Politics Daily. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics Daily. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Damn Right We Should Take Some Time On This One (cont.)
TW: More excerpts from the Wood piece from this morning. But he frames two crucial issues. One is that over and over especially in the Muslim world (and this was also a huge issue in Vietnam) the insurgent, nationalists have massive advantages over the occupying or legacy government in providing basic security. The Taliban are radicals and misogynistic but they have provided certain types of internal stability that the previous and current Afghan governments have not. Corruption in Afghanistan and surrounding areas is rife not least amongst our local external and internal allies. For the average Afghan male who could give a crap about our problems the Taliban are a viable and in certain ways superior option to the Western allies and their domestic Afghan partners.
Hamas and Hizbollah employ some of the same approaches to win over indigenous voters within Gaza and Lebanon. Weak, ineffectual and most of all corrupt local governments create a void into which their radical Islamist based security becomes an attractive alternative.
Secondly, COIN is hard. Any foreign force starts out with massive disadvantages as the relatively ignorant outsiders. Regardless the time, money and blood necessary to effectively implement COIN is tremendous. Should the U.S. and its allies decide to double down with our commitments, folks should understand we are talking about years, hundreds of billions of $ and thousands of casualties. I say implement not win COIN. Few can define what "winning" a counter-insurgency when the variables are so broad even means.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity.''
By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice. Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials. The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.
Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.
That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last month.But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs, disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's almost a mentality versus a single operation...''
Hamas and Hizbollah employ some of the same approaches to win over indigenous voters within Gaza and Lebanon. Weak, ineffectual and most of all corrupt local governments create a void into which their radical Islamist based security becomes an attractive alternative.
Secondly, COIN is hard. Any foreign force starts out with massive disadvantages as the relatively ignorant outsiders. Regardless the time, money and blood necessary to effectively implement COIN is tremendous. Should the U.S. and its allies decide to double down with our commitments, folks should understand we are talking about years, hundreds of billions of $ and thousands of casualties. I say implement not win COIN. Few can define what "winning" a counter-insurgency when the variables are so broad even means.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity.''
By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice. Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials. The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.
Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.
That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last month.But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs, disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's almost a mentality versus a single operation...''
Damn Right We Should Take Some Time On This One
TW: Some folks are urging Obama to commit the U.S. to a substantial escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan immediately without further review and without significant new strategies. This would be a foolish approach to what could be a seminal inflection point in American history. Afghanistan and Pakistan are strategic and our path chosen there will have ramifications for decades.
Post 9/11 in a fit of almost universal passion and anger (I amongst them) charged into Afghanistan to push out the Taliban but then we proceeded to wallow without a clear strategy and certainly without an effective policy. Eight years later we face a smorgasbord of shitty options. Wood does a nice job of framing the conundrum.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior commanders and national security officials:
-- The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to the commander in chief.
-- The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and, specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.
-- Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin. Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.-- Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly) reluctant to provide.
-- If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.
--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.
So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops, forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month: "Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate...''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/01/obamas-war-take-your-time/
Post 9/11 in a fit of almost universal passion and anger (I amongst them) charged into Afghanistan to push out the Taliban but then we proceeded to wallow without a clear strategy and certainly without an effective policy. Eight years later we face a smorgasbord of shitty options. Wood does a nice job of framing the conundrum.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior commanders and national security officials:
-- The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to the commander in chief.
-- The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and, specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.
-- Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin. Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.-- Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly) reluctant to provide.
-- If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.
--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.
So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops, forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month: "Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate...''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/01/obamas-war-take-your-time/
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The Face OF COIN
TW: Wood is one of the relatively few American reporters who spend much time and much effort analyzing our involvement in AfPak in a systematic way. Below he outlines the face of counter-insurgency. It is expensive, time-consuming, only partially kinetic and mainly civil affairs oriented. It is also dangerous. For the Americans (and our allies of whom there are many in Afghanistan unlike Iraq) but more so for the locals. COIN is always more dangerous for the locals than than the outsiders as they will be left holding the bag if our COIN efforts fail.
Finding individual instances of progress and success do not necessarily tell the ultimate tale. Are these successes scalable given our realistic willingness and ability to commit resources?
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Security here is entirely in the hands of Shakar Khan and other police and Afghan army units, as it is in other cities in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are active and vicious here, but the local cops manage to keep the streets relatively safe. American troops work from small outposts well outside of town, coming into town to assist the police in tactical training and to help local officers learn how to take more responsibility for budgeting, logistics, recruiting and long-range planning.
What surprised me was the emotional bond evident between American GIs and the Afghan police. In their high-fives and hugs of greeting, they are clearly fond of each other. And having well-armed Americans around surely provides comforting reassurance that the out-manned and out-gunned Afghan police aren't facing a ruthless and better-armed enemy alone.
For six weeks, I'd been deep inside Afghanistan, trying on my fourth trip here to get a fix on this vexing conflict. What I already knew: the U.S. intervention here has been badly bungled. Many Afghans blame us for liberating their country in 2001 – and then abandoning them when the Taliban surged back two years later. The U.S. has poured billions of dollars into badly designed development projects; corruption has blossomed. Seven years were wasted.
What I learned: That Americans in Afghanistan, both military war-fighters and military and civilian development experts, finally have their act together. As a result, at least in some parts of the country, people are becoming more secure, more kids are literate, more people have jobs, and more people have a glimpse of a better, non-Taliban life.
...The U.S. is running a full-court press across eastern Afghanistan against IEDs and suicide bombs, an effort that ranges from aerial sensors and electronic surveillance to on-the-ground police work penetrating IED cells and rolling up the organizers and financiers. GIs work with local cops to collect intelligence and encourage Afghans to report IED activity. Result: more than half of all known IEDs are discovered and disarmed before they detonate – by no means perfect, but solid progress.
Increasingly these cases are headed to Afghan criminal courts. U.S. military and civilian police experts work with Afghan cops and prosecutors on crime forensics, preserving evidence, building cases. "It's painstaking work anywhere,'' said George Clay, a police advisor with the 82nd Airborne Division in central Afghanistan. "But multiply that by the [Afghan] legal system and cultural barriers and the red tape, it's a really hard thing to do.'' In one recent case, Afghan police turned up with evidence collected with gloves, stored in plastic bags, tagged and with affidavits attesting to the chain of custody. "I was elated!'' said Clay.
But a refrain I heard over and over, from guys like Clay to the sergeants who man the police training teams and the lieutenants and staff sergeants who lead combat assaults and raids on Taliban: There simply aren't enough U.S. troops here to do the job.
"We are getting there, but not fast enough,'' Col. Michael Howard, the senior combat commander in eastern Afghanistan, told me. "The violence has to come down to a level where it doesn't affect the daily lives of people, to a point where people aren't afraid to take an active part in their government. Right now we're not at that level.'' Howard has asked for additional troops, knowing that manpower is limited. But, he argued, "if you apply an additional 100 infantry soldiers, then you will have a commensurate increase in the speed at which the violence comes down."
..."That's what's gonna win this thing,'' Lt. Col. Rob Campbell, a combat commander in Paktiya Province, told me. Farming means jobs; better, more effective farming means more jobs, giving people an alternative to accepting $40 to plant a Taliban IED in the roadside or to allow Taliban fighters to hide their weapons in the village mosque.
A team of agricultural experts from the Indiana National Guard is training a dozen Afghans to teach farmers to improve crop yields with better planting techniques, careful water conservation, more powerful livestock feed. They are teaching mountainside villagers to build "catch dams,'' constructed simply of local stacked stone, to slow spring runoff and soil erosion. Together with Afghan farm experts, they are experimenting with mulberry "bricks,'' high-protein animal feed made from local materials.
In a related program, soldiers are teaching village women to make high-protein baby formula from locally available produce. That's a project of the civil affairs teams led by Special Forces Maj. James N. Schafer. "I wish I had more teams,'' he told me. "We are doing better; things are better than a year ago. But we need more civilians – we don't need more guys carrying guns.''
....East of Kabul, for example, the U.S. funded a new road, a project intended to provide immediate jobs, get farmers more cash by speeding their produce to market, and build support for local government. The road was proposed, designed and built by Afghans, using local Afghan asphalt and stone-crushing plants and local labor. Cab fare for the one-hour ride to Kabul has already dropped from $9.50 to $3. When the road was recently opened, the provincial governor performed the ribbon-cutting; to emphasize that this was an Afghan government operation, no American officials were present.
...As he suggested, there are risks with working with Americans. "If Afghans want to work with us, they and their families become targets,'' said Lt. Col. Cindra Chastain, an officer with the Indiana National Guard's agricultural development team. "Only the brave are going to do it.''
...Increasingly, there are Afghans, like the parents in Charikar, who are willing to stand against the Taliban. But their courage, it seemed to me, is fragile. People will take a principled stand when they know they are not alone. "They are as scared of us leaving as we are,'' said an American officer.
And we have left before. I think that was the message Shakar Khan was trying to imprint on me as he held my hand in his squalid little office in Khowst. My friend, he said. Do not go"
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/16/a-plea-from-afghanistan-my-friend-do-not-go/
Finding individual instances of progress and success do not necessarily tell the ultimate tale. Are these successes scalable given our realistic willingness and ability to commit resources?
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Security here is entirely in the hands of Shakar Khan and other police and Afghan army units, as it is in other cities in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are active and vicious here, but the local cops manage to keep the streets relatively safe. American troops work from small outposts well outside of town, coming into town to assist the police in tactical training and to help local officers learn how to take more responsibility for budgeting, logistics, recruiting and long-range planning.
What surprised me was the emotional bond evident between American GIs and the Afghan police. In their high-fives and hugs of greeting, they are clearly fond of each other. And having well-armed Americans around surely provides comforting reassurance that the out-manned and out-gunned Afghan police aren't facing a ruthless and better-armed enemy alone.
For six weeks, I'd been deep inside Afghanistan, trying on my fourth trip here to get a fix on this vexing conflict. What I already knew: the U.S. intervention here has been badly bungled. Many Afghans blame us for liberating their country in 2001 – and then abandoning them when the Taliban surged back two years later. The U.S. has poured billions of dollars into badly designed development projects; corruption has blossomed. Seven years were wasted.
What I learned: That Americans in Afghanistan, both military war-fighters and military and civilian development experts, finally have their act together. As a result, at least in some parts of the country, people are becoming more secure, more kids are literate, more people have jobs, and more people have a glimpse of a better, non-Taliban life.
...The U.S. is running a full-court press across eastern Afghanistan against IEDs and suicide bombs, an effort that ranges from aerial sensors and electronic surveillance to on-the-ground police work penetrating IED cells and rolling up the organizers and financiers. GIs work with local cops to collect intelligence and encourage Afghans to report IED activity. Result: more than half of all known IEDs are discovered and disarmed before they detonate – by no means perfect, but solid progress.
Increasingly these cases are headed to Afghan criminal courts. U.S. military and civilian police experts work with Afghan cops and prosecutors on crime forensics, preserving evidence, building cases. "It's painstaking work anywhere,'' said George Clay, a police advisor with the 82nd Airborne Division in central Afghanistan. "But multiply that by the [Afghan] legal system and cultural barriers and the red tape, it's a really hard thing to do.'' In one recent case, Afghan police turned up with evidence collected with gloves, stored in plastic bags, tagged and with affidavits attesting to the chain of custody. "I was elated!'' said Clay.
But a refrain I heard over and over, from guys like Clay to the sergeants who man the police training teams and the lieutenants and staff sergeants who lead combat assaults and raids on Taliban: There simply aren't enough U.S. troops here to do the job.
"We are getting there, but not fast enough,'' Col. Michael Howard, the senior combat commander in eastern Afghanistan, told me. "The violence has to come down to a level where it doesn't affect the daily lives of people, to a point where people aren't afraid to take an active part in their government. Right now we're not at that level.'' Howard has asked for additional troops, knowing that manpower is limited. But, he argued, "if you apply an additional 100 infantry soldiers, then you will have a commensurate increase in the speed at which the violence comes down."
..."That's what's gonna win this thing,'' Lt. Col. Rob Campbell, a combat commander in Paktiya Province, told me. Farming means jobs; better, more effective farming means more jobs, giving people an alternative to accepting $40 to plant a Taliban IED in the roadside or to allow Taliban fighters to hide their weapons in the village mosque.
A team of agricultural experts from the Indiana National Guard is training a dozen Afghans to teach farmers to improve crop yields with better planting techniques, careful water conservation, more powerful livestock feed. They are teaching mountainside villagers to build "catch dams,'' constructed simply of local stacked stone, to slow spring runoff and soil erosion. Together with Afghan farm experts, they are experimenting with mulberry "bricks,'' high-protein animal feed made from local materials.
In a related program, soldiers are teaching village women to make high-protein baby formula from locally available produce. That's a project of the civil affairs teams led by Special Forces Maj. James N. Schafer. "I wish I had more teams,'' he told me. "We are doing better; things are better than a year ago. But we need more civilians – we don't need more guys carrying guns.''
....East of Kabul, for example, the U.S. funded a new road, a project intended to provide immediate jobs, get farmers more cash by speeding their produce to market, and build support for local government. The road was proposed, designed and built by Afghans, using local Afghan asphalt and stone-crushing plants and local labor. Cab fare for the one-hour ride to Kabul has already dropped from $9.50 to $3. When the road was recently opened, the provincial governor performed the ribbon-cutting; to emphasize that this was an Afghan government operation, no American officials were present.
...As he suggested, there are risks with working with Americans. "If Afghans want to work with us, they and their families become targets,'' said Lt. Col. Cindra Chastain, an officer with the Indiana National Guard's agricultural development team. "Only the brave are going to do it.''
...Increasingly, there are Afghans, like the parents in Charikar, who are willing to stand against the Taliban. But their courage, it seemed to me, is fragile. People will take a principled stand when they know they are not alone. "They are as scared of us leaving as we are,'' said an American officer.
And we have left before. I think that was the message Shakar Khan was trying to imprint on me as he held my hand in his squalid little office in Khowst. My friend, he said. Do not go"
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/16/a-plea-from-afghanistan-my-friend-do-not-go/
Friday, May 8, 2009
Nope They Still Do Not Get It
TW: I get a little nervous that the Republicans might be about to hit bottom with all this talk of "the fall of the Republican Party" including a cover story now on Time magazine. But then something like this piece pops up to keep me confident that still they do not get it. The striking thing to me is not the list of apostates the conservative writer wishes to banish from his party (despite the veracity of Carville's quote- see "quotes of the month" to the right), but who is not on the list. None of the crazy talk radio/TV folks (Glenn Beck...), no mention of the wacky or ineffectual congressional folks (Michelle Bachman, John Boehner, Jim Bunning etc.), just the apostates the ones who deign to try to reform from within and one faux plumber who Lewis would banish not on substance but on the form of an unknown retaining the spotlight.
From Matt Lewis at Politics Daily:
"All this talk about Sen. Arlen Specter's defection...got me fantasizing about other Republicans who ought to follow him out the door.The following list is by no means comprehensive -- and I do reserve the right to amend it -- but for now, these are the 10 Republicans who annoy me most ...
1. Kathleen Parker - If you've heard of Kathleen Parker, it is probably because of her now-famous early criticisms of Sarah Palin...she condescendingly wrote: "Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country." Because Parker is seen as a "conservative" (her articles can be found at National Review and Townhall.com) her early criticism spawned many "even conservatives have turned on her" stories -- and emboldened the mainstream media to continue their attacks on Palin. Of course, this was a brilliant career move for Parker, who now is frequently featured as a Washington Post columnist. I predict she will follow in the footsteps of Arianna Huffington, who, of course, was also a conservative once.
2. Meghan McCain - What can I say about her that hasn't already been said? My position can best be summed up by Matthew Yglesias, who wrote: "To the best of my knowledge we're talking about a young woman who's never accomplished anything or held a job."
3. Chris Buckley - If his endorsement of Barack Obama wasn't enough to make you wonder about this conservative scion, his unflattering portrayal of his late, great parents in his new book should have done the trick. It's one thing to be an apostate, but quite another to be a son who profits from telling the intimate, private details about your parents.
4. Peggy Noonan - It's not her famous MSNBC "open-mic" moment with GOP strategist Mike Murphy at the RNC convention that bothers me most; it is, instead, the tired maudlin shtick of hers that makes me want to jump out the window every time I see her on TV. Noonan has written some good books, but her act has grown old. I can take her increasingly liberal positions -- but not the histrionics.
5. Steve Schmidt - I was an outspoken fan of Schmidt's when he first took over as manager of the McCain operation. Since losing the campaign, though, he has become a bit of a liberal crusader, arguing that the GOP must moderate itself. My take: This former Karl Rove protege should stick to worrying about making the trains run on time -- and leave the opining to someone else.
6. Colin Powell - We once had high hopes for Powell, but those hopes are long gone. One can only assume Powell's resentment over his treatment as Bush's Secretary of State was what pushed him to endorse Barack Obama last year. Sadly, rather than fade away, this old soldier is back again this week with fresh criticisms of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.
7. Sens. Brownback, Voinovich, Grassley, Hatch, Lugar, et al. -- I lumped these guys together because these Republican senators all have the same attitude, which is that they believe they should be fitted for togas. These guys seem to be competing to become the new Arlen Specter. Who will win???
8. Arnold Schwarzenegger - If anyone thinks that the solution to the GOP's problems is to "moderate," they need look no further than Arnold Schwarzenegger's abysmal approval ratings in California. Now, the Governator is saying he might endorse a Democrat for California governor, which leads me to wonder why anyone would want the endorsement of someone so unpopular.
9. David Brooks and David Frum - I ran into David Brooks on the street the other day, and a kinder, more well-dressed man you will never meet. I've never met Frum, but I suspect he would take a swing at me if he saw me. In any event, I lump this "army of Davids" together because they both fit into the same rubric: Formerly conservative writers who have been co-opted by Barack Obama and the elites in New York and D.C. Why are they listed at number nine? Both have been well behaved these last couple of weeks (that, and David Brooks complimented me on my Baltimore Orioles hat).
10. Joe the Plumber - Joe's conservative philosophy is surprisingly more sound than anyone else on this list. But his 15 minutes are over."
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05/07/top-10-most-annoying-republicans/
From Matt Lewis at Politics Daily:
"All this talk about Sen. Arlen Specter's defection...got me fantasizing about other Republicans who ought to follow him out the door.The following list is by no means comprehensive -- and I do reserve the right to amend it -- but for now, these are the 10 Republicans who annoy me most ...
1. Kathleen Parker - If you've heard of Kathleen Parker, it is probably because of her now-famous early criticisms of Sarah Palin...she condescendingly wrote: "Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country." Because Parker is seen as a "conservative" (her articles can be found at National Review and Townhall.com) her early criticism spawned many "even conservatives have turned on her" stories -- and emboldened the mainstream media to continue their attacks on Palin. Of course, this was a brilliant career move for Parker, who now is frequently featured as a Washington Post columnist. I predict she will follow in the footsteps of Arianna Huffington, who, of course, was also a conservative once.
2. Meghan McCain - What can I say about her that hasn't already been said? My position can best be summed up by Matthew Yglesias, who wrote: "To the best of my knowledge we're talking about a young woman who's never accomplished anything or held a job."
3. Chris Buckley - If his endorsement of Barack Obama wasn't enough to make you wonder about this conservative scion, his unflattering portrayal of his late, great parents in his new book should have done the trick. It's one thing to be an apostate, but quite another to be a son who profits from telling the intimate, private details about your parents.
4. Peggy Noonan - It's not her famous MSNBC "open-mic" moment with GOP strategist Mike Murphy at the RNC convention that bothers me most; it is, instead, the tired maudlin shtick of hers that makes me want to jump out the window every time I see her on TV. Noonan has written some good books, but her act has grown old. I can take her increasingly liberal positions -- but not the histrionics.
5. Steve Schmidt - I was an outspoken fan of Schmidt's when he first took over as manager of the McCain operation. Since losing the campaign, though, he has become a bit of a liberal crusader, arguing that the GOP must moderate itself. My take: This former Karl Rove protege should stick to worrying about making the trains run on time -- and leave the opining to someone else.
6. Colin Powell - We once had high hopes for Powell, but those hopes are long gone. One can only assume Powell's resentment over his treatment as Bush's Secretary of State was what pushed him to endorse Barack Obama last year. Sadly, rather than fade away, this old soldier is back again this week with fresh criticisms of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.
7. Sens. Brownback, Voinovich, Grassley, Hatch, Lugar, et al. -- I lumped these guys together because these Republican senators all have the same attitude, which is that they believe they should be fitted for togas. These guys seem to be competing to become the new Arlen Specter. Who will win???
8. Arnold Schwarzenegger - If anyone thinks that the solution to the GOP's problems is to "moderate," they need look no further than Arnold Schwarzenegger's abysmal approval ratings in California. Now, the Governator is saying he might endorse a Democrat for California governor, which leads me to wonder why anyone would want the endorsement of someone so unpopular.
9. David Brooks and David Frum - I ran into David Brooks on the street the other day, and a kinder, more well-dressed man you will never meet. I've never met Frum, but I suspect he would take a swing at me if he saw me. In any event, I lump this "army of Davids" together because they both fit into the same rubric: Formerly conservative writers who have been co-opted by Barack Obama and the elites in New York and D.C. Why are they listed at number nine? Both have been well behaved these last couple of weeks (that, and David Brooks complimented me on my Baltimore Orioles hat).
10. Joe the Plumber - Joe's conservative philosophy is surprisingly more sound than anyone else on this list. But his 15 minutes are over."
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05/07/top-10-most-annoying-republicans/
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