Here in the United States we have been debating how many of the 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up against some 100 Al Qaeda operatives and maybe 25,000 Taliban, should be withdrawn, when perhaps we should have been focused on another set of numbers: Cellphone penetration in Afghanistan was at 30 percent in 2009, is now at 50 percent and will be at 70 percent before long, so how do we ensure this dramatic trend empowers in positive rather than negative ways? Texting can be good counterterrorism.

(Oh, and let’s make a call to the Afghan president on one of those mobile phones that goes like this: “Mr Karzai, listen up dude, we’re going to cut the number of troops fast enough so you get the message we’re not bankrolling your fork-tongued ruses any longer.”)

Karzai too will pass. What won’t is that technology and international relations are becoming interchangeable topics. There are many more networks in our future than treaties.

I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.

- Roger Cohen, Positive Disruption

I can’t find a citation of “The Age Of Behavior” anywhere, so Cohen must have heard it in private conversation. However, it sounds like he just means connectivity. I am pushing for the full vision of a liquid world: mobile, social, connected and webbed.

Drawing Down, With a Vigilant Eye on Pakistan - NYTimes.com

The rationales for staying in Afghanistan for an additional three plus years are getting surreal:

David Sanger via NY Times

[…] there are two reasons American planners hope to negotiate with the government of President Hamid Karzai an agreement to keep upward of 25,000 American forces in Afghanistan, even after the 30,000 “surge” troops are withdrawn over the next 14 months, and tens of thousands of more by the end of 2014.

Their first is to assure that Afghanistan never again becomes a base for attacks on the United States. But the more urgent reason is Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama invited Pakistan to expand its peaceful cooperation in the region, but he also noted that Pakistan must live up to its commitments and that “the U.S. will never tolerate a safe haven for those who would destroy us.”

Pakistan has already made it clear, however, that it will never allow American forces to be based there. As relations have turned more hostile with the United States in recent months, it has refused to issue visas to large numbers of C.I.A. officers and seems to be moving quickly to close the American drone base in Shamsi, Pakistan.

For their part, administration officials make it clearer than ever that they view Pakistan’s harboring of terrorist groups as the more urgent problem. “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said Wednesday in briefing reporters before the president’s speech. Later he added, “The threat has come from Pakistan.”

So now we are going to maintain 25,000+ troops in Afghanistan, after the war there has been ‘won’, because our ‘ally’, Pakistan, that we give billions of dollars to every year, is now the breeding ground for the ‘terrorists’ that threaten America.

We are are already at war with Pakistan. It is a clandestine, 21st century war of drones, espionage, and political imbalance led by the CIA. It’s purpose is to keep Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of Al Queda in Pakistan. However, the Pakistani government is directly or indirectly supporting Al Queda, so we are indirectly at war with Pakistan. But no one calls it war.

It is easy to imagine a downbeat scenario here: a stolen nuke, an explosion in Kabul, ten thousand killed, and a US intervention in Pakistan to secure the remaining weapons, with 100,000 troops invading yet another Asian country to eradicate the boogieman under our bed.

I wonder how much of this is the ancestral fear of the American Indians, just over the horizon? The American psyche was shaped by the expansion west, and in the early days the Indians were a close and constant presence, and terrorist-style warfare went on for hundreds of years.

Are we still afraid of the savage redskin? Have we ever stopped rolling west, killing the injuns as we go?

Plan B in Afghanistan - Robert Blackwell

There are no easy or cost-free ways to escape the current quagmire in Afghanistan. Although it has problems, a de facto partition of Afghanistan, in which Washington pursues nation building in the north and counterterrorism in the south, offers an acceptable fallback.

[…]

Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of Afghanistan’s south and east.

Afghan Leader Admits His Office Gets Cash From Iran - Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin

President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that he regularly receives bags of cash from the Iranian government containing millions of dollars, saying he uses the off-the-books fund to pay expenses incurred in the course of doing his job.

Mr. Karzai made his remarks during a rambling, sometimes incoherent appearance at a news conference during which he accused the United States of funding the “killing” of Afghans by paying thousands of gunmen as private security contractors to guard buildings and convoys here. It was the latest outburst in a bitter dispute with the United States and its NATO allies that has taken on an increasingly anti-Western tone. The Iranian payments are intended to drive a wedge between Mr. Karzai and his American and NATO benefactors, Afghan officials have said.

Duing the news conference, Mr. Karzai confirmed a report in The New York Times on Sunday that said his chief of staff, Umer Daudzai, was covertly receiving as much as $6 million in cash — often stuffed in bags — from Iranian officials.

“They do give us bags of money — yes, yes, it is done,” Mr. Karzai said. “We are grateful to the Iranians for this.”

“Patriotism has a price,” he said.

Ka-boosh!

That’s an astonishing admission. The leader of Afghanistan is taking money from an extremely partisan foreign power, one with its hand in Afghan, Iraqi, and Lebanese politics. A giant slush fund. And we are to suppose there are not strings attached?

Get Tough on Pakistan - Zalmay Khalilzad

Let me get this straight. We invaded Afghanistan and overturned the Taliban government because the Taliban was harboring Al Qaeda — specifically, Ossama bin Lauden — and Pakistan was ostensibly our ally in this.

Now we are supporting the rapprochement between the newly created and US-backed Afghan government with the Taliban, while Pakistan is harboring what remains of Al Qaeda (specifically bin Lauden) in Pakistan.

So, the saber rattling begins: we should invade Pakistan, Khalilzad is saying, and attack those terrorists still hiding there.

Meanwhile the question remains, what is the US military doing in Afghanistan, then?

The Pakistani military continued to avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or Al Qaeda forces in North Waziristan.

White House quarterly report on Pakistan to Congress

(Source: The New York Times)

In The Shadow War, Nothing Is As It Seems

Video Hints at Executions by Pakistanis

An Internet video showing men in Pakistani military uniforms executing six young men in civilian clothes has heightened concerns about unlawful killings by Pakistani soldiers supported by the United States, American officials said.

[…]

After viewing the graphic video on Wednesday, an administration official said: “There are things you can fake, and things you can’t fake. You can’t fake this.”

[…]

The video adds to reports under review at the State Department and the Pentagon that Pakistani Army units have summarily executed prisoners and civilians in areas where they have opened offensives against the Taliban, administration officials said.

The video appears to have been taken in the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani military opened a campaign last year to push back Taliban insurgents. The effort was widely praised by American officials and financed in large part by the United States.

The reports could have serious implications for relations between the militaries. American law requires that the United States cut off financing to units of foreign militaries that are found to have committed gross violations of human rights.

But never has that law been applied to so strategic a partner as Pakistan, whose military has received more than $10 billion in American support since 2001 for its cooperation in fighting militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda based inside the country.

[…]

The Pakistani military is believed to have detained as many as 3,000 people in makeshift prisons in the region of its operations. Reluctant to turn them over to Pakistan’s undependable courts or to grant them amnesty, the problem of what to do with the detainees has grown pressing.

This is the Shadow War, conducted behind the Official War. Pakistan, nominally our ally, and at least the part of the government that takes our money is officially at war against the militants in the region. But the militants have many allegiances, like the Baluchis, who have been trying to free themselves from Pakistan for decades. And some of the militants are allied, at least in part, with parts of the Pakistani government, and have been used to do its bidding in Afghanistan and in the ungovernable frontier.

It is a place where interests are veiled, vows of loyalty are balanced not kept, and there is no shared polity, only endlessly warring factions, constantly jockeying for more power.

And we hope, somehow, to stabilize a region where basically none of those in any position of power want stability as it would be if mandated by the US and UN.

There is no ‘winning’ the Shadow War, there is only getting pulled deeper into shadow.

Were the teenagers militant Taliban? Were they just protesters that didn’t go along with what the Pakistani government was doing? Were they protesting or trying to avenge other murders? Were the killers really killing them. Were they Pakistani soldiers, or locals hired by the Pakistanis as mercenaries?

There is no end to these questions, and in a real sense, the ‘truth’ is unreachable/ There are only more shadows behind the shadows.

Which is why we have to leave. We have other shadows to deal with, like our economy, the climate, the social liberties of our own citizens. We don’t need more shadows.

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Our Third War In Asia: Pakistan

Obama had a national mandate to step down our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have moved all but 50,000 troops out of Iraq. The problem is that the military top brass got him to move a lot more troops to Afghanistan. And now we are playing whack-a-mole in Pakistan, the thrid front on our never-ending war on ‘terror’.

Mark Mazetti and Eric Schmitt, C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks on Taliban in Pakistan

The strikes also reflect mounting frustration both in Afghanistan and the United States that Pakistan’s government has not been aggressive enough in dislodging militants from their bases in the country’s western mountains. In particular, the officials said, the Americans believe the Pakistanis are unlikely to launch military operations inside North Waziristan, a haven for Taliban and Qaeda operatives that has long been used as a base for attacks against troops in Afghanistan. Some Pakistani troops have also been diverted from counterinsurgency missions to help provide relief to victims of the country’s massive flooding.

Beyond the C.I.A. drone strikes, the war in the region is escalating in other ways. In recent days, American military helicopters have launched three airstrikes into Pakistan that military officials estimate killed more than 50 people suspected of being members of the militant group known as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for a spate of deadly attacks against American troops.

Such air raids by the military remain rare, and officials in Kabul said Monday that the helicopters entered Pakistani airspace on only one of the three raids, and acted in self-defense after militants fired rockets at an allied base just across the border in Afghanistan. At the same time, the strikes point to a new willingness by military officials to expand the boundaries of the campaign against the Taliban and Haqqani network — and to an acute concern in military and intelligence circles about the limited time to attack Taliban strongholds while American “surge” forces are in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have angrily criticized the helicopter attacks, saying that NATO’s mandate in Afghanistan does not extend across the border in Pakistan.

As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.

“Petraeus wants to turn up the heat on the safe havens,” said one senior administration official, explaining the sharp increase in drone strikes. “He has pointed out to the Pakistanis that they could do more.”

Why is there no national dialogue on this? I guess the military’s rules of engagement allow them to do this, but the way that Petraeus is playing brinksmanship with the Pakistanis is way over the top.

Afghanistan is now widely recognized as one of the world’s premier gangster-states. Out of 180 countries, Transparency International ranks it, in terms of corruption, 179th, better only than Somalia.

Dexter Filkins, Inside Corrupt-istan, a Loss of Faith in Leaders

(Source: The New York Times)

That’s a date when a process begins, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not the date when the American forces begin an exodus and look for the exit and the light to turn off on the way out of the room.

David Petraeus, referring to the date, July 2011, that President Obama has targeted for US troops to start to withdraw from Afghanistan. But Petraeus makes it sound like the withdrawal might take decades.

The State Of The War

It’s time for a clear policy on Afghanistan:

The State of the War in Afghanistan

We believe that the United States has a powerful national interest in Afghanistan, in depriving Al Qaeda of a safe haven on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This country would also do enormous damage to its moral and strategic standing if it now simply abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban’s brutalities.

But, like many Americans, we are increasingly confused and anxious about the strategy in Afghanistan and wonder whether, at this late date, there is a chance of even minimal success.

I am uncertain about the ‘powerful national interest’ we supposedly have in Afghanistan, and I have come to question whether our national interests — even when they are real — justify actions like a 10 year war in Central Asia. But it is certain that a successful end to Afghanistan is becoming ever more unlikely.

Zardari Says The War In Afghanistan Is Being Lost

The controversy about Pakistan’s ambivalence or active antipathy to the stated goals of its allies in Afghanistan — the US, Britain, and other coalition partners — continues to simmer. Asif Ali Zadari, Pakistan’s president, in Paris, says the war is being lost and the Taliban are playing a waiting game:

John Burns, Afghan War Is Being Lost, Pakistani President Says

“The international community, to which Pakistan belongs, is losing the war against the Taliban,” Mr. Zardari said in the Le Monde interview. “This is above all because we have lost the battle to win hearts and minds.”

On the Taliban, he struck an ambiguous chord, saying at one point that “they have no chance of regaining power, though their influence is growing,” and at another that their ability to be patient means “time is on their side.”

In a reference to President Obama’s decision to virtually triple American strength in Afghanistan over the past 18 months, to a current level of about 95,000, Mr. Zardari added: “Military reinforcements are only a small part of the response. To win the support of the Afghan people, we must bring them economic development, and prove that we can not only change their lives, but improve them.”

The Pakistan leader’s remarks were similar to what many skeptics on the war in Britain and the United States — as well senior officials and military commanders in both countries — have said, though his bluntness in expressing them as he headed for Britain, where popular support for the war is at a low ebb, was bound to stir controversy.

Inevitably, too, his remarks appeared set to deepen the gulf between Pakistan and Britain that opened last week after Prime Minister David Cameron, during a visit to India, accused Pakistan of duplicity — in Mr. Cameron’s words, looking “two ways” — in its relations with the Taliban.

[…]

At a recent forum in Bangalore, India, Mr. Cameron was asked about suggestions of a duplicitous policy by Pakistan toward the Taliban that The New York Times and other news organizations drew from a trove of 75,000 leaked United States military documents posted on the Internet earlier last week by the whistle-blower organization WikiLeaks.

These accounts suggested that Pakistan, while mounting military offensives against the Taliban in its own northwestern tribal areas, has continued to arm, train and finance the Taliban in Afghanistan through its military intelligence arm, Inter-Services Intelligence. It did so in part to ensure that any future Taliban government in Afghanistan would be friendly to Pakistan, the documents said.

In Bangalore, Mr. Cameron said the West “cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country,” meaning Pakistan, “is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror.” The remarks caused a furor in Pakistan, in part because they were made during a visit to India, Pakistan’s historic nemesis.

In Le Monde, Mr. Zardari offered his own rebuttal. “This is absurd,” he said. “There are no good Taliban with whom we could speak and bad Taliban whom we must fight. Pakistan and its people are the victims of terrorists. We are not simply defending our borders, we are fighting against terror and those who spread it.”

So Zardari seems to be saying that nation building is the way to ‘win’ the war in Afghanistan, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people (actually a large number of heterogenous groups with divided loyalties, contested geography, and mutually unintelligible language groups), based on ‘economic development’.

Afghanistan is among the poorest countries in the world, and it will take — literally — many decades to turn the corner on the economy there.

Zardari is taking the realpolitik angle in this debate, rather than saying what the coalition wants to hear. He is doubling down on the waning commitment of the Americans to stay and fight in Afghanistan, and preparing for a political context in which the US have a significantly smaller role.

Perhaps he is awaiting the Chinese, who share a border with Afghanistan, and who have a historic rivalry with India, who Pakistanis view as their real enemy.

Afghanistan was a backwater until the US decided to chase Bin Lauden, who is now hiding somewhere in Pakistan. But we have decided to pacify Afghanistan instead of confront Pakistan for their harboring of Al Queda. We continue to call the Taliban the enemy, because they supported Al Queda, but now Al Queda is in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.

We are fighting a set of ideologies with bullets instead of arguments, and we will inevitably run out of bullets; but ideologues will never run out of words.

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A New Military Approach For Afghanistan?

Counterinsurgency out, Counterterrorism in:

Helene Cooper and Mark Landler, Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

Mr. Obama’s timetable calls for an assessment in December of how his [Afghanistan] strategy is faring. The administration has not yet begun a formal review of the policy. But while several officials said Mr. Obama remained committed to the strategy he set out at the end of last year, they conceded that the counterinsurgency part of it had lagged while the counterterrorism part had been more successful.

That divergence could lead to a replay of last year’s policy debate, in which Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pushed for a focus on capturing and killing terrorist leaders, while the Pentagon, including the current commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, pushed for a broader strategy that also included a strong focus on securing Afghan population centers with more troops.

Still, in an interview Thursday with “Today” on NBC, Mr. Biden appeared to reiterate his earlier stance.

“We are in Afghanistan for one express purpose: Al Qaeda,” he said. “Al Qaeda exists in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are not there to nation-build. We’re not out there deciding we’re going to turn this into a Jeffersonian democracy and build that country.”

The administration’s shift in thinking is gradual but has been perceptible in the public remarks of various officials. The incoming commander of the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, was asked last week by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, whether the administration’s July 2011 date for starting to withdraw American troops implied a shift in emphasis from counterinsurgency to a strategy concentrating on killing terrorists.

“I think that is the approach, Senator,” he replied.

The emerging American model can best be described as “counterterrorism, with some counterinsurgency strategy that forces the hands of insurgent leaders,” said a diplomat with knowledge of the planning. It melds elements of both strategies in a policy that continues to evolve, as conditions change.

This may lead to a more clear-cut approach for Afghanistan, but opens the door to adventures in the world wherever there is a group that calls itself Al Queda. We could be playing Whack-A-Mole across half the world.

Tom Friedman’s Realpolitik

Friedman pulls off the masks that Asian nations have been using with the US, and  starkly lays out the structure of the duplicity involved in our dealings there. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and China are involved in a deep and long-term effort to outsmart us, and to destabilize us, all the while acting publicly as our friends and allies:

Thomas Friedman, The Great (Double) Game

[…]

China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the U.S. military makes China’s military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce our oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taliban schools and warriors our soldiers are fighting against.

So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Obama just foolish?

It is more complicated. This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And we responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.

So we tried to impact them by indirection. We hoped that building a decent democratizing government in Iraq would influence reform in Saudi Arabia and beyond. And after expelling Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, we stayed on to stabilize the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.

That strategy has not really worked because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are built on ruling bargains that are the source of their pathologies and our fears.

Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India. The Pakistani Army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India — and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani Army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taliban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for “strategic depth” because, if India dominated Afghanistan, Pakistan would be wedged between the two.

Alas, if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools, farms and industry, instead of Afghanistan, it might be able to produce a stable democracy — and we wouldn’t care about Pakistan’s nukes any more than India’s.

Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam — and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.

So Pakistan’s nukes are a problem for us because of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is a problem for us because of the nature of that regime. We have chosen to play a double game with both because we think the alternatives are worse.

So we pay Pakistan to help us in Afghanistan, even though we know some of that money is killing our own soldiers, because we fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan’s Islamists controlling its bomb. And we send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though we know that some of it ends up financing the very people we are fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilizing. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)

So, buried within the feudalism that controls Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are factions that are deeply opposed to America’s liberalizing tendencies. Al Queda isn’t a country, it is an anti-Western movement grounded in fundamentalist Islamic societies: an intrinsic part of those cultures.

Meanwhile irredentist China is slowly sending out its tendrils into the region. The border wars with India in the ’60s led to huge territories of India falling into their control (Aksai Chin, for example). China is likely to be the primary beneficiary of newly uncovered mineral treasures in Afghanistan, a country with which they share a border, only the most obvious of that county’s expansionist tendencies (watch out for the South China Sea War over the Spratlys and the Paracels).

Back home, our rhetoric about the region never digs deep enough. We never state that the repression of Saudi Arabia is the root cause of the mess in Yemen, and that the yearning for an Islamic republic in Pakistan/Afghanistan is what makes Afghanistan/Kashmir/Pakistan a tinderbox.

We couch our challenges in terms that make them seem to be solvable with the tools we have: Western diplomacy and military force. Our tools shape our thinking, our vision. We are trapped by the skills we have, we are being played because there is no trick up our sleeves that can work with these tricksters.

Friedman says we should diminish our bets in this rigged game, and protect ourselves by getting off the oil addiction. All good advice, but considering the stupidity in Washington — where our elected officials are proved unable to pass a realistic energy bill because of the stranglehold that energy companies seem to have — it’s not likely to happen soon.

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