Exercising the Colonel

Above, one of David Low’s Colonel Blimp cartoons from the lead up to the Second World War. You can see and read more of the Colonel in this blog’s most popular post by far, from a few years back.

I would love to look back at Low’s satires of muddled thinking and be able to say how out of date they seem, but that’s far from being the case. David Low’s Blimp character was primarily a satire on right-wing little Englander pro-appeasement attitudes, but Low also took aim at similar views on the Left via his Pmilb character: Blimp backwards. Today’s Pmilbs and Blimps continue to muddle ideas of radical left and reactionary right, of liberalism and of bigotry.

A couple of prime examples from the past pages of this blog are Simon Jenkins, a modern-day little Englander who has found a comfortable berth at the supposedly liberal Guardian, and Judith Butler, a leading academic in feminist and gender theory who contrived to describe Hamas and Hezbollah, two violent, sectarian, antisemitic and misogyninist organisations, as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

Several more examples have been on parade in recent days, with a series of supposedly Left commentators eager not to distance their own beliefs from those of religiously bigoted anti-democratic fanatical murderers, but rather to point to how close in agreement they are, and to claim justification of motive (though not of course of action) for bloody public murder on a London street.

Take Rachel Shabi’s comments on the Woolwich murder, beginning with this tweet:

Just told Sky news #Woolwich a collective problem, we should not single out Muslims; need to look into Brit foreign policy element
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

There is nothing that controversial here in my eyes. Radicalisation is a problem for the whole of society to deal with. To charge one group with responsibility for solving it in isolation would seem likely to be counterproductive. And UK foreign policy? What about it? That aspect could be taken in a number of directions.

But then she clarified that her preferred response to the murder was “eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device”.

.@nicholasblincoe it's not that madness can be cured. more about eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

So here Rachel Shabi sees UK foreign policy as bad and believes that as murderers of today and potential murderers of tomorrow agree with her, that policy should change. However when pressed by Rob Marchant on the question “Should foreign policy change as a result of these attacks,” she tries to split hairs:

@rob_marchant @tomsp @tomharrismp UK foreign policy in Mid East should change cos it is hypocritical, counterproductive NOT cos of attacks
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 25, 2013

Rachel Shabi insists that “understanding is not justifying,” but though she doesn’t justify the act she does justify the motive, making clear that she sees anger over UK foreign policy, the only motive to which she gives any consideration, as “justifiable anger,” and again “justified anger”.

Incredibly, having concluded that this anger over actions like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan leads to radicalisation and acts of terror, she then does her little bit to encourage such anger with a wholly one-sided representation of today’s news story on prisoners held by the British Army in Afghanistan:

This is how UK 'liberates' #Afghanistan: with unlawful detentions in secret prison ind.pn/112ek85
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 29, 2013

It’s an interesting story, though not so simple as Rachel Shabi would have you believe.

If I found that any of my views were shared by such cutthroats I think I might want to consider whether I was somehow in error, but Rachel Shabi is not alone in finding affirmation in such an alignment. There are more happy to declare their, at least partial, agreement with the murderers...

Ian Leslie points to the stupidity of ex-mayor Ken Livingstone blaming the attack on the invasion of Iraq.

Our friend in Canada, Terry Glavin, adds Michael Moore and Glenn Greenwald (in the Guardian) to his list of moral illiterates weighing in on Woolwich. He writes:

Do note that it isn’t some imam in some dingy mosque carrying on like that, although now and then there will be one of those, too. Note as well that the overwhelming majority of Afghans, and the overwhelming majority of Afghan-Canadians, supported NATO’s intervention, and most of these people are, as it happens, Muslims.

Note well that these idiocies about blowback and retaliation do not generally come from the mosques at all. It’s the sort of rubbish that comes from out of the mouths of moral illiterates.

It should stop.

Norman Geras finds Greenwald’s failure of logic replicated in a Guardian article by Terry Eagleton, and lays out the mechanism to display its faults.

Jonathan Freedland doesn’t forget the Stop The War Coalition, who naturally take their own alignment with the declared motives of murderers as absolute vindication.

Nick Cohen, like Terry Glavin above, takes the time to point out some people most likely not in agreement with the murderers, namely victims of Islamist violence, mostly Muslim, not just in Afghanistan but also Pakistan, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia. The list is far from exhaustive.

Bizarrely Rachel Shabi refers to Nick Cohen’s article as “a cluster bomb of muscular liberal lunacy.” Whatever about lunacy, I think her metaphor of an indiscriminate weapon of mass slaughter to describe the article is perhaps an example of what they refer to in the mental health business as projection. (A more complex analysis here by blogger Unrepentant Jacobin.)

Funnier still is that after Livingstone, Moore, Greenwald, Eagleton and the Stop The War Coalition have all had their say, Rachel Shabi writes 950 words on how debate is being stifled, closed, sealed shut even. And all of her words are published by the Guardian.

Checking my prejudices - 2

In the earlier post, I spent some time on a single paragraph of a recent Simon Jenkins column from The Guardian on the subject of Afghanistan. The column was titled Vanity, machismo and greed have blinded us to the folly of Afghanistan, and the first paragraph was as follows:

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country's drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world's greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

I spent some effort looking at the issue of hunger in Afghanistan. You can read the full post here, but the short of it is that directly contrary to Simon Jenkins’s claim that “western occupation of Afghanistan” has led to starvation, wheat production (the central issue in Afghanistan’s food shortages) has never been as low since the 2001 defeat of the Taliban as it was before. This is despite drought, primitive agricultural practices, the absence of a viable milling industry, and the underfunding of the WFP. I hadn’t originally intended to spend so much effort on that one claim, but the subject is a serious one.

That earlier post also includes a passage from Terry Glavin’s excellent new book, Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, to demonstrate why Simon Jenkins’s phrase “western occupation of Afghanistan” is the exact opposite of truth.

Now I’d like to go through the rest of the column. A lot of it is just abuse, which is pointless to argue with, but as well as looking for clear falsehoods like the ‘western occupation causes hunger’ claim, I’d like to clarify the argument behind the abuse and lies.

Here’s another lie to make clear that my use of the word isn’t just rhetoric: he writes of “the decade-long punishment of Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden.” To believe that the US or NATO has been punishing Afghanistan is to disbelieve the opinion of the majority of Afghans. The graph below is taken from the December 2010 ABC/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll, Afghanistan: Where Things Stand (ABC story here and full PDF here) and it shows support for the presence of US forces amongst Afghans surveyed ranged between 78% and 62% in the years from 2006 to 2010.

The graph also shows satisfaction with US efforts dropping faster than support for their presence, suggesting that while the majority of Afghans want the US military presence, they also want them to do a better job. But for all the dissatisfaction, this is clearly not a nation that believes it is undergoing “punishment” by the US as Simon Jenkins claims.

Another Jenkins quote: “The demand that [Afghanistan] also abandons the habits of history and adopt democracy, capitalism and gender equality was imperial arrogance.” On capitalism, a 1999 article, The Life of a 102 year-old Afghan Entrepreneur: An Economic Perspective, by Mir Hekmatullah Sadat, gives an interesting view of 20th century developments in Afghan capitalism. On gender equality, the struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan didn’t begin with the fall of the Taliban; here’s a short chronology. As for democracy, in every democratic country, the struggle for democracy has been a struggle against the habits of history.

And this, his opposition to democracy’s struggle against the habits of history, can be the key to unwrapping Simon Jenkins’s argument, and showing how perverse it is that he has become a resident favourite in the pages of The Guardian, supposedly a paper of the liberal left.

Simon Jenkins is on the side of of tradition against change, Tory against Whig, Lords against Commons, feudalism against democracy.

His anti-war argument is not the same as that of the anti-West anti-imperialist kitsch left, though it sounds it at times. His stand against British imperialism is rooted in nationalist isolationism rather than second-campism. He claims that the West’s Afghanistan policy will likely benefit “those who lost the cold war, Russia and China”. Similarly in a more recent column, Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran? he writes that it seems as if “every utterance from Washington and London at present is scripted to bolster the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his insecure throne,” and laments that:

The attempt to set up pro-west regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan led the west to upset the balance of power established by the Iran-Iraq war and the Taliban-Pakistan regime in Kabul. Now the Iraq occupation has secured for Tehran unprecedented influence in Baghdad. Its influence also penetrates deep into western Afghanistan, and its support for resistance movements in the Gulf sheikhdoms is said to be growing by the year.

Be very clear about what he’s saying in the quote above. He laments the loss of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and of Pakistan’s domination of Afghanistan via the Taliban, because these regimes helped contain Iran, a greater enemy in his view. This is the brutal talk of a right wing ‘Realist’ rather than a second campist hoping for the overthrow of Western hegemony. I don’t like the latter any more than the former, but I do find it extraordinary that The Guardian gives regular space to the kind of reactionary views I remember seeing in The Sunday Telegraph in the 1990s.

I’ll have mercy and stop there. If I can suppress the nausea, I might do a third post on the bigotry of Mr Jenkins, but I’m not promising.

I agree with Fidel Castro . . .

. . . about the robot threat:

Castro is really worried about robots. He follows stories about US military innovation closely and is particularly exercised by the evolution of pilotless warplanes. "In 20 years," he writes of the US air force, "every single one of their warplanes will be robot-operated." And it won't stop there. "If robots in the hands of transnationals can replace imperial soldiers in the wars of conquest," Castro warns, the transnationals will "flood the world with robots that would displace millions of workers from their workplaces".

Via Global Dashboard.

Though I hate the robots in the supermarket already, I think it’s worse than Castro describes. I see toy spy drones controlled by phones advertised on billboards. Drones are being used for crop spraying. This period of time where robot weapons are used exclusively by state militaries may be very short, and existing defences may prove highly permeable to robot terrorism.

Robot radio from last year: from PRI’s The World, Jeb Sharp interviews PW Singer about Drones - The New Normal, and Mr Singer also turns up in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Robo Wars (MP3), while on WNYC’s Radiolab, Robert Krulwich asks Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly What Does Technology Want?.

And for a humble insight into how we bio-robots work, listen to Richard Dawkins on BBC Radio 4’s The Age of the Genome.

Long live NATO’s anti-imperialism

There has been a lot to blog about on Afghanistan in recent weeks, but I haven’t had the strength, though I’ve read a lot elsewhere and commented occasionally.

Comment trail: on anti-imperialism at Contested Terrain, and on non-Western imperialism in Afghanistan at Terry Glavin’s joint. My argument in short: as the only powers capable of sustaining imperialist policies in Afghanistan are its neighbors, none of whom are reliable allies of NATO, by necessity NATO’s policy in Afghanistan is on the whole anti-imperialist.

Intersectionality

Comment trail: on feminism and war at Pickled Politics.

There, blogger Earwicga seems of a view similar to that heard from Judith Butler & Co. earlier, that feminism is only valid if it’s also anti-war, and anti-Western anti-imperialist. This seems to mean that making too much noise about Islamist theocratic misogyny is bad as that could be seen as pro-war and Islamophobic. In support of this, Earwigca introduces the word ‘intersectionality’.

Now it seems to me that intersectionality can usefully be used to illustrate precisely the failure in contemporary anti-imperialism. Earwigca gives two references to explain her use of the word: Wikipedia and a PDF from the African American Policy Forum, A Primer on Intersectionality. Here intersectionality is used to describe the problem of individuals or groups focusing on one particular form of discrimination, for example sexism, being unable to fully recognise and understand another form of discrimination, for example racism, causing a blind spot when they are faced with a victim of multiple overlapping forms of discrimination.

Where the focus is on just one form of discrimination, these more complex cases can be obscured as the wrong kind of victim, or the wrong kind of discrimination.

Misapplying intersectionality

The AAPF document takes the argument further and talks of the danger that treating different forms of discrimination separately may lead to different groups of victims seeing themselves as being in competition with each other, and not being aware of the vulnerabilities of their fellows who fall into the overlap between groups. Thus there's a danger that those arguing against one form of discrimination may fall into another. A small example of this I once heard in polite conversation: “The French are very racist,” i.e. xenophobic bigotry in the name of anti-racism.

This argument about one group of victims being set against another forms the centre of Judith Butler’s arguments against mainstream German gay rights campaigners (see her mis-definition of double jeopardy for example) and criticisms of Peter Tatchell by some anti-imperialists (see here and here).

So what happens when this argument is misapplied? The sweeping statement “group X discriminate against group Y” is likely to be discriminatory against group X, but what about an analysis along the lines of “some members of group X discriminate against some members of group Y, or against members in the overlap between X and Y”? If this kind of analysis of discriminatory action by a subset of X is made properly, with examples given and mechanisms demonstrated, it should not be dismissed in the same terms as the earlier sweeping statement about X being bad to Y.

If it becomes impossible to look at individuals and subsets within X discriminating against Y or discriminating against the common membership of X and Y, then another kind of blind spot results, not of the wrong kind of victim, nor the wrong kind of discrimination, but of the wrong kind of perpetrator of discrimination.

Thus Islamist misogynists become the wrong kind of misogynists because they are a subset of Muslims who as a group are the target of religious discrimination, and individual immigrants who are homophobic are the wrong kind of homophobes because they belong to a group that is the target of xenophobia and racism. The consequence is that Muslim victims of misogyny and immigrant victims of homophobia fall under the blind spot of those arguing too narrowly against religious discrimination, or too narrowly against xenophobia and racism: precisely the result that ‘intersectionality’ attempts to avoid.

An example of ‘right and wrong kind of perpetrator’ thinking can be found in Judith Butler’s comments at Bully Bloggers, where she expresses her preference for looking at perpetrators on the German right or in the Catholic Church, rather than in migrant communities. If she argued ‘as well as’ that would be fine, but ‘instead of’ is not good.

An intersectionality of blind spots

Now to return to feminism, war, and anti-imperialism. Back to Earwicga’s post where she raises ‘intersectionality’. Here she labels Gita Sahgal’s criticisms of Amnesty International as Islamophobic, and described the recent Time cover photograph of Aisha, a mutilated young Afghan woman, as “yet another manipulation of feminism supported by feminists ignorant of other power structures”.

Earwigca’s problem here is the same as Judith Butler’s. Islamists are the wrong kind of misogynists because they are a subset of Muslims who are a target of religious discrimination. It doesn’t matter that the victims of Islamist mysogyny are also members of that same group of victims of religious discrimination; they fall into the ‘wrong perpetrator’ blind spot.

Looking at it further, there is an intersectionality of ‘wrong perpetrator’ blind spots at work here. Not only are the Taliban the wrong kind of misogynists, but as Muslims discriminating against Christians, Buddhists, and versions of Islam other than their own, they are the wrong kind of religious bigots. As agents of Pakistani and Iranian imperialism fighting against a popular Afghan government allied with Western powers, they are the wrong kind of imperialists.

For those viewing the world with these intersecting blind spots, the only way the abuse of women like Aisha becomes visible is if the cause is traced through a game of degrees of separation to Western policies in Afghanistan decades ago, though not back as far as the Soviet invasion, as that would lead to another blind spot. Having found the only acceptable cause of the abuse, the remedy offered is of course the withdrawal of exactly those Western forces standing in the way of a return to power by the actual, immediate perpetrators of the abuse.

How do anti-imperialists maintain this degree of blindness without poking their own eyes out?

More on talking to the Taliban

Following on from an earlier post, here’s Michael Semple again, this time together with Gilles Dorronsoro and Joanna Nathan, Afghanistan specialists all, talking at the Center for American Progress on the topic of Reconciliation and Insurgency, Political Strategies in the Afghan War.

Via Abu Muqawama.

On Afghanistan, and some other countries

From BBC Radio 4, Simpson in Afghanistan, available to listen for the next four days. Reporting and comment from correspondent John Simpson, highly recommended.

A short post from The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, Underestimating Al Qaeda. Mr Wright is the author of much valuable in-depth reporting in this area.

Basics from The Canada-Afghanistan Blog, Afghanistan is not Iran, and from Terry Glavin, Afghanistan is not Vietnam.

Speaking of Vietnam, not a good place to be a blogger, see here, here and here.

Not Iran

It’s hard to keep your eyes pointing in all directions at once . . .

Iraq, and Thoughts on Intervention, by Roland Dodds. Added: Ibn Muqawama on Joe Biden, Iraq envoy.

At the SWJ, Pentagon planners should study Somalia, not just Hezbollah.

Sietske in Beirut writes on conversations she has. Not many dead, according to the papers.

Via Mick Hartley, Riots in China. Mick has also paid particular attention to the Uighurs being released from Guantanamo, fleshing out their tale with information on ongoing repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang. Since his last round up on the story, The New York Times has published a report on the Uighurs settled in Bermuda.  

Georgia’s Hard Slog to Democracy by Michael Cecire, at Michael Totten’s blog. Related at the NY times, Russia’s Neighbors Resist Wooing and Bullying.

Also from Michael Totten, A Conversation with Robert D Kaplan. This does include discussion of Iran, along with China’s involvement in Sri Lanka, Russia and its neighbours, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However I’d like to highlight an exchange at the end regarding Israel’s failure in counterinsurgency, material relevant to the essay topic set in an earlier post here.

Kaplan: You know what’s interesting? The Israelis. They’ve been great at defeating structured Arab armies, but they haven’t figured out how to deal with a few thousand insurgents in South Lebanon or in Gaza. What did their wars in 2006 and 2009 in Lebanon and Gaza get them? MJT: It got them fewer rockets for a while, but it’s temporary. Kaplan: Yeah. MJT: I don’t know what they should do. They can’t put a David Petraeus in Gaza or Lebanon. It won’t work. Kaplan: No. MJT: And they can’t fight a counterinsurgency from the air because that’s just absurd. Kaplan: Yeah. They haven’t been able to solve this problem at all. MJT: I’m glad it isn’t up to me what Israel should do. There aren’t any good options. Maybe they should hold Syria accountable. Syria is at least a state with a return address and national interests. I don’t think the Syrian government is particularly ideological. It isn’t like the Iranian government. Syria isn’t an ideology, it’s a state. Kaplan: It wants to survive. MJT: Maybe the Israelis should lean on Assad. They can’t lean on Hamas or Hezbollah. They can’t lean on Beirut because Beirut is too weak to do much. Kaplan: Yeah. I mean, the idea of bombing highway overpasses near Beirut to punish Lebanon for Hezbollah is ridiculous.

Kaplan and Totten point to Israel’s failure to develop of a true counterinsurgency campaign, but positive suggestions are still lacking. Tackling the Syrian regime may be relevant, but does not address the absence of a population-centric strategy. Any takers? 

Update: Vigilant as I try to be, one direction I didn’t think to look was down.

A talk by David Kilcullen

Part of the Authors@Google series, this is an hour long, so too much to summarise, but to encourage you to listen here’s some of what he covers:

He gives a clear explanation of the main theme of his book, The Accidental Guerilla, on how the wrong war-fighting strategies make insurgencies worse. He talks about recent American and British mistakes in counter-insurgency, at one point paying particular attention to the British experience in Basra. He praises the Danish military in Afghanistan, which is nice to hear. He also talks of how aid projects need to be informed by counter-insurgency thinking in order to be effective. And he talks about Pakistan, and the insurgency there that scares him much more than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Now your essay topic for this week: what would a proper counter-insurgency approach to Gaza look like? Hint: containing the population together with the enemy, thus allowing the enemy to consolidate its control of the population, that is not it.

Via Abu Muqawama. Also at Abu Muqawama, Sleepwalking into Helmand, on recent British experience in Afghanistan.

Delicious and galoshes

Take the hear

out of your air

so you can hair

what I’m seeing.

A Times Higher Education Supplement illustration from late in the last century. If you’re feeling flush, Denis Kitchen has some drawings of mine from that time for sale on his site. A tip: the black and white ones may be the better deal, as a lot of my colour work from the THES days was rendered with Talens dyes which are prone to fade if exposed to sunlight for too long. My current work is all acrylic and more light-fast.

And now, some links . . .

Abu Muquwama on the fighting in Swat: Control and Collaboration.

(Related, from BBC News: Cynicism among Pakistani refugees.)

Information Dissemination on a USN strategy for dealing with piracy: run away.

ModernityBlog on certain weird-left attitudes to Ahmadinejad: he’s a racist, but-

David T of Harry’s Place on Geert Wilders: Enemy of Liberalism.

Azarmehr has too many interesting posts from the past few weeks for me to link to just one.

None of your elephant percussion ensembles from Thailand here: Jams turns up the volume for his seven songs.

Update - a few more . . .

William Wray has a post all about reds.

More music from Mick Hartley: The Tan Canary.

Some numbers from Strangers into Citizens: the costs (12.7m euros) and gains (190m euros) of the 2005 Spanish regularisation process for immigrants.

A little conversation between some old boys of Hollywood:

- We always used to wear jackets and ties in the industry, but now you look like you’re shot out of a cannon, that’s the look you want. You should have holes in your knees there and everything.

- I got holes in my knees, but they’re covered!

Spring Place

Kentish Town, London, yesterday lunchtime. Like the previous painting, this was on paper I’d coated with colour before leaving home, green this time obviously.

When I saw this photo of soldiers in a poppy field on the front page of the International Herald Tribune a couple of days ago, I was tempted to have a go at copying it in paint. But instead you get the street sweeper vehicle and a car tail-light. See Abu Muqawama here and here for doubts on a poppylationcentric strategy in Afghanistan.

Also at Abu Muqawama: Bad Days for the British Army, which links to this FT editorial. The FT writes:

In an epic week of cack-handed decisions, tin-eared judgment and political misery for the government of Gordon Brown, by no means the least damaging move – for the country rather than the Labour party – was choosing to duck out of sending more UK troops to Afghanistan.

Let us be clear. There are huge problems with strategy towards Afghanistan. Local political development is warped by corruption and warlordism, but also by most economic development being in the hands of NGOs and foreign aid agencies. It is hard to see how the fight against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies can be combined successfully with a losing war on drugs. In geo-strategic terms, Pakistan’s soldiers and spies will not cease supporting jihadis as proxy warriors in Afghanistan (and Kashmir) until détente with archrival India is resumed. Clearly, there are also well-rehearsed differences between Nato allies about what fighting an insurgency means.

Nonetheless, if the UK is committed to the war in Afghanistan – and it is – it must will the means. Grand strategy aside, if the British government sends an expeditionary force to perform a difficult and dangerous job, it is an elementary political obligation to provide it with adequate resources. Unlike Iraq, this was not a war of choice.

The rest here. (If you have difficulties registering for FT articles it’s possible to view the whole thing by replacing the word ‘false’ with ‘true’ in the address displayed on your browser.) 

The one argument neglected by the FT is one raised by a commenter at Abu Muqawama earlier  in the year, that while fighting the Taliban in Pakistan may be essential in defending Afghanistan, holding Afghanistan could equally be essential if there is to be any chance of defending Pakistan from the Taliban. Extremism in Pakistan is a direct threat to Britain as well as to Britain’s allies. To help counter that threat the British government must be prepared to do everything possible in Afghanistan. Sending 700 temporary troops when the army wanted a long-term deployment of 2,000 more is not doing everything possible.

More on Afghanistan from Ghosts of Alexander, “thanks for the money, I’ll use it to kill you later,” and watching Rambo III. Earlier in the week from AM on  Pakistan, Kilcullen on the Pakistani Army, and also via AM,  Nicholas Scmidle suggests saving Pakistan by drawing a line along the Indus River. This suggestion in itself graphically shows how bad things are.

And via the SWJ, today’s Telegraph has a headline saying “US general says Pakistan could be just two weeks from collapse” though the article says something different, that General Petraeus is giving Pakistan’s military two weeks to act before coming to a decision on how the US should respond to Taliban gains. Newspaper editors, don’t you just love ’em?

Also today, in the Washington Post, Moment of truth in Pakistan, again via the SWJ:

“My experience is that knocking them [the Pakistani government and military] hard isn’t going to work,” said Mullen. “The harder we push, the further away they get.” For the crackdown on the Taliban to be successful, he said, “it has to be their will, not ours.” 

That’s Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One more via the SWJ, US Takes Dutch Military as Role Model in Afghan Operation.

Torture and terror

Norman Geras has two related posts that say most of what needs to be said:

Obama and the torture memos

Terror as accident

For myself, what I find strange about much of the animosity towards the phrase ‘War on Terror’ is that the words could be so useful in defining the moral and legal parameters of the current fight. To be against terror should mean to be against torture, against the illegal use of violence, illegal force, illegal detention.

It must be possible for states, and individuals, to use effective legal force to defend themselves and their allies. And it must be possible to detain enemy fighters in war until they are no longer a threat. But for a War on Terror to be all the name implies, it has to be a fight for the interlinked principles of universal human rights, rule of law, and democracy. All of the wrong decisions by the previous US administration on treatment of prisoners, from torture to confusion on legal status, were defeats in the War on Terror.

Added - ED Kain puts it well: stating the obvious.

A conversation with David Kilcullen

In yesterday’s Washington Post. Short and well worth reading.

Related discussion at AM here.

The language of defeat

“Exit strategy.” Now when Obama used those words in talking about Afghanistan on CBS yesterday, I don’t believe he meant what the jackals and vultures must hope he meant. I don’t think he meant what the schoolgirls of Afghanistan and Pakistan might fear he meant. I don’t believe he was even intending to speak to those people. His words were aimed to reassure his electorate.

But words travel (AP, AFP, BBC) and when the enemy hear “exit strategy” they will think of America’s flight from Vietnam, from Lebanon, from Somalia. They will smell blood and gain strength, just as doubts about American steadfastness will grow in the hearts of the good people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

And amongst those currently in the employ of the enemy, whatever number might potentially be enticed away by better prospects, they certainly won’t be encouraged to change direction by talk of an American exit strategy.

Obama closed his remarks on Afghanistan by saying “it is not acceptable for us to simply sit back and let safe havens of terrorists plan and plot”. If safe havens for terrorists are not acceptable, and if America is eventually to leave, then the only acceptable exit strategy is a victory strategy for democratic government in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Musharraf experience shows that the notion of an acceptable dictator is not a viable alternative for security.

Enough of exit strategies. The only worthwhile aim in war is victory. To set about the business of killing for anything less is grotesque. Let’s hear about a victory strategy, a strategy of security through victory for the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan to govern themselves free of violence and intimidation.

Earlier: The language of victory.

Update: A stronger message from Obama, via Daimnation.

AFPAK

Via Terry Glavin, a 15 minute documentary on Swat Valley, Pakistan, from the New York Times, Class Dismissed in Swat Valley.

George Packer at The New Yorker, Wanted in Pakistan: Competent Counterinsurgency. Reacting to a report on American military advisers in Pakistan, he writes:

What’s worrying is the nature of the help American forces are giving: intelligence for Pakistani air strikes and commando operations aimed at killing or capturing Taliban and Qaeda leaders.

What’s wrong with this picture? Have a look at the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual, written under the leadership of General Petraeus. What experts call the kill-capture model was exactly the wrong approach to take during the early years of the Iraq war. This kind of emphasis always ends up creating more new enemies than it can eliminate old ones. Only when the military changed its strategy to protecting the population did the war in Iraq take a turn for the better.

February 24th in the New York Times, Strikes Worsen Qaeda Threat, Pakistan Says. Related, February 9th at the SWJ, Crunch Time in Afghanistan-Pakistan by David Kilcullen, calling in part for a change in policy on air strikes in Pakistan. Also, Abu Muqawama Declares Jihad on Google Earth.

And another one from Abu Muqawama, A Question from the Readership. His questioning reader writes:

Why is it that for all the ‘we can’t win Afghanistan without Pakistan’ talk, it’s never vice versa? In the New York Times, you made an excellent case for considering what exactly victory means in Afghanistan. Right below you, Parag Khanna stressed that International Forces are only at best pushing the Taliban problem over the border, and that we must consider stabilizing Western Pakistan to stabilize Afghanistan. Put the two together, and the road to success, as it were, seems gloomy and difficult. But can the question be flipped? To stabilize Western Pakistan, do we need to stabilize Afghanistan? [...]

I remember in the dark days of 2006, leading up the announcement of the surge, the meme for Iraq became (and still is) that leaving could lead to regional war and ethnic conflict. That case never seems to be made with Afghanistan. Would leaving mean that the anti-Pakistan elements have more room to cooperate with drug traffickers, and more opportunity to take down what seems to be the most collapsible nuclear weapons state? I guess I’m wondering what your opinion would be on the effect on Pakistan if the mission does wind down in Afghanistan?

Still to read in the current issue of The New Yorker, The Back Channel, India and Pakistan’s Secret Kashmir Talks, by Steve Coll.

Earlier related post here.

Bags of money, up for grabs . . .

. . . and Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan. Also India, China, Russia, and, um, Iran? And hard, long, difficult, challenging, and hard.

Some words from two conversations about Afghanistan on the Charlie Rose Show. From last Monday February 16th, a discussion with Milt Bearden, Dexter Filkins, Craig Mullaney and Martha Raddatz (via this SWJ post on Craig Mullaney’s new book The Unforgiving Minute), and from last Friday February 20th, an interview with Richard Holbrooke.

Recently I posted on Afghanistan and tea drinking. Here’s a tea reference that’s more to the point, in words from General Petraeus earlier this month:

A nuanced appreciation of the local situation is essential. Leaders and troopers have to understand the tribal structures, the power brokers, the good guys and the bad guys, local cultures and history, and how systems are supposed to work and do work. This requires listening and being respectful of local elders and mullahs, and farmers and shopkeepers – and it also requires, of course, many cups of tea.

That quote was used to open a radio discussion on The Brian Lehrer Show with Nathaniel Fick and John Nagl, all about counter-insurgency and Afghanistan, broadcast on WNYC February 10th, again via the Small Wars Journal.

Also on that same SWJ post, a TV interview with Tom Ricks on The Daily Show. An excerpt from his new book The Gamble, about the surge strategy in Iraq, appeared in The Times on Saturday and attracted the notice of both Mick Hartley and Norman Geras. The headline was Emma Sky, British ‘tree-hugger’ in Iraq who learnt to love US military.

Out with the family on Wednesday, we chanced upon this exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society showing Victorian photographs and drawings of Afghanistan, with a few more recent images included as comparisons. The exhibition still has a few days to run. I would have liked to have spent longer, but Dan Dare beckoned us further down Exhibition Road.

One of the photos in the Royal Geographical Society exhibition turns up in a recent post at Ghosts of Alexander, ‘Afghanisation’, a rather unfortunate neologism.

Two links to close: returning to a favourite theme, from Roland, This is “Realism”? And good news on the Canadian home front via Terry, Jonathon Narvey: Cheer The Hell Up. Of course once you start linking to Terry and his friends it’s hard to stop, but enough is enough is too much.