Top American General Claims Surge is Working — Time for a Reality Check?

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The Telegraph reports today that the senior NATO officer in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, believes that the tide in the country is starting to turn against the Taliban.

““We’ve been at this for about seven months now and I believe we’ve made progress,” Gen Stanley McChrystal said in an interview with ABC television.

[...]

The general recounted a recent meeting in the Helmand river valley in the country’s south – a former Taliban stronghold – as an example of progress underway.

“When I sit in an area that the Taliban controlled only seven months ago and now you meet with a shura of elders and they describe with considerable optimism the future, you sense the tide is turning,” he said.

Gen McChrystal issued a dire warning to Mr Obama in September, saying the Afghan mission could fail without more troops. Early in his presidency Mr Obama sent an additional 21,000 troops. It is these that have already begun to make a difference.

Only 8,000 to 9,000 of the second tranche of 30,000 have begun to arrive in Helmand.

Asked if Nato-led forces were shifting the momentum against Taliban insurgents, the general said: “I believe we’re doing it right now.”"

The Parallax Brief wishes he could believe such an upbeat report, and certainly hopes that NATO troops can defeat the Taliban; however, truth be told, he can’t. Indeed, he doesn’t think it’s possible for large, western democracies to win counter-insurgency wars at all.

Of course, we could, if we were willing to jettison our morality and return to the cold hearted brutality of days gone by; and if we could stomach hundreds of our boys coming home in body bags after fighting a war of dubious virtue. But we are willing to do neither, so how is it possible to combat a brutal enemy that is willing to lose 25 of his men for one of ours because he knows that if he can just hang in there long enough, time — or at least demographics, as Israel will soon discover — is on his side.

But, even looking at Afghanistan specifically, it seems strange that such an upbeat outlook has come hot on the heels of perhaps the gloomiest official prognosis yet, delivered on December 23rd during a briefing by Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in the country, a slide from which is pictured below, and curiously unreported by the Telegraph.

According to Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, Gen. Flynn stated during his presentation that:

The Taliban not only has the “momentum” after the most successful year in its campaign against the United States and the Kabul government. “The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely,” and, “The Taliban retains [the] required partnerships to sustain support, fuel legitimacy and bolster capacity.”

And if that isn’t enough, Flynn also warns that “time is running out” for the American-led International Security Assistance Force. “Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse,” the report says.

The “loosely organized” Taliban is “growing more cohesive” and “increasingly effective.” The insurgents now have their own “governors” installed in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. And the “strength and ability of [that] shadow governance increasing,” according to the presentation. The Taliban’s “organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding.”

Of course, it could be that the situation has changed dramatically since Gen. Flynn gave his briefing. You decide.

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The Importance of Knowing Dick

December 3rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Former Vice President Richard Cheney has been lambasted since he left office for his strident criticism of the Obama administration. Leading members of an administration are expected maintain decorum and hold back on criticism of their successors for at least a year. Daniel Drezner, the largely conservative foreign policy expert, usually defends Cheney for doing so on the principle that Cheney feels strongly enough about Obama’s policy to speak out. But even Drezner seems to have reached the limit with Cheney’s brazenly self-serving, propagandizing and lies.

So I’m inclined to cut Cheney some slack for his decision to speak out. On the other hand, when we read the Politico interview, Cheney’s actual sins come out:

“Cheney rejected any suggestion that Obama had to decide on a new strategy for Afghanistan because the one employed by the previous administration failed.

Cheney was asked if he thinks the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the disintegration of Afghanistan because of the attention and resources that were diverted to Iraq. “I basically don’t,” he replied without elaborating (emphasis added).”

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I dare any Cheney supporter to make the argument that Afghanistan was hunky-dory until January 20, 2009, at which point things went to hell in a handbasket.

For the rest of us on the Planet Earth, there’s no way to read that passage and not come to one of two possible conclusions:

—Richard B. Cheney is a liar;

—Richard B. Cheney is so unconnected from reality that it is impossible to trust anything he says.

I don’t mind that Cheney speaks up for what he thinks is right — I mind that he’s a liar.

This matter raises two points — one of which is not that Dick Cheney is a liar, which is incontestable fact.

The first is that the problems Britain and America face now are as a direct consequence of the Bush administration’s decision to divert men and materiel from Afghanistan to Iraq. It’s worth remembering why we are in Afghanistan, because the official line on this matter has shifted so many times that that it has become the most nebulous of concepts. NATO went into Afghanistan because its government was providing shelter to those who perpetrated a horrifying terrorist attack on a NATO member. It wasn’t to nation build, improve women’s rights, or reduce the supply of heroin to the west (noble causes as they are). But, just as the job was almost done, and with Bin Laden and the Taleban and Al Qaeda leadership in within grasping distance, the Bush administration and their supine British partners decided fighting a largely unrelated war against Iraq was more important. The criminals of the century escaped; the Taleban could regroup and start an insurgency campaign against a strategically drifting and materially starved military coalition in the country.

It also, however, highlights the second problem, which is that Obama back home faces an opposition that has completely abandoned the notion of “Loyal Opposition” and will literally do or say anything to attack the President.

That isn’t to say that Obama is faultless. The Parallax Brief sees all kinds of gaps and contradictions in the President’s decision on Afghanistan, but key to understanding how we reached this point is to understand the problems created by what Cheney represents: the Obama administration faces a fantastically expensive (politically, economically, emotionally) COIN war (which are almost invariably lost by advanced western democracies) without a particularly compelling mission against a political backdrop where a hysterical opposition is willing to stoop to outright lies and rabble rousing.

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Afghanistan Stretches American Military Might to Limit, Draws Key Questions into Sharp Focus

November 24th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Barack_Obama_meets_with_Stanley_A._McChrystal_in_the_Oval_Office_2009-05-19

News has broken that President Barack Obama is likely to wait until after Thanksgiving to announce his much anticipated Afghanistan decision, but if anyone had any doubts of the hard place in which the President finds himself, a blog entry Wired.com’s The Danger Room should dispel that myth.

“First of all, the situation in Afghanistan is very different than the situation we faced in Iraq in the sense that we do not have the same kind of transportation access to Afghanistan that we did in Iraq, where we were able, over a five-month period or so, to bring in five brigade combat teams,” [Secretary of Defense Roberty Gates] said. “So almost everything of consequence has to go in by air.”

Around 115,000 troops remain in Iraq right now, and a sizeable contingent will need to stick around to support elections — which may be delayed until spring. And there needs to be enough infrastructure [in Afghanistan] to support the influx of troops, along with equipment to protect them from roadside bombs and other key gear.

[...]

Earlier this week, Spencer Ackerman crunched the numbers on possible Army deployments. “If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002,” he wrote.

And this doesn’t mention the cost — which will run to a minimum of 12 figures (hundreds of billions) for a genuine counterinsurgency plan — no small matter for a country with unemployment over 10% and public debt higher than at any time since WWII.

Is it not, given the scale of the task, now worth considering whether this will be blood and treasure well spent? What was Afghanistan for, anyway? Certainly, the US had every right to go into Afghanistan — and NATO, the charter of which demands that an attack on one of its members is considered an attack on the rest, had to follow — given that the Afghan regime at the time was harbouring the criminals who perpetrated the heinous 9/11 attacks. But once Bush decided that dealing with Saddam Hussein was more important than, you know, catching the people who actually committed the crime, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were allowed to wriggle out of the bear trap and Tora Bora, regroup and come back into an Afghanistan occupied by a military starved of resources and strategically drifting.

So who, now, are we spending billions to fight, and for what? The criminals have flown the coop.

And It can’t be to deprive terrorists a safe havens, because, as the Parallax Brief has already shown, terrorist attacks are just as likely to be planned in Hamburg or Bradford as Afghanistan (even if Afghanistan was the only country in the world convenient for terrorist training — Sudan, Somalia, anyone?)

The only good reason the Parallax Brief can think of for fighting the war is to show that NATO won’t be beaten. To prove that we can do what the Soviets couldn’t. To not permit the the Taliban to land the psychological blow of beating off the “imperialist aggressor”.

But even this is hard to believe when victory seems to be an opaque, nebulous concept in this war.

Actually defining what constitutes victory, and how withdrawal will be conducted when that victory has been achieved, will be an essential starting point for President Obama and NATO when he makes his decision. Committing every available American combat brigade to war on the idea of “just not losing” and because the generals asked, is not an option — no matter how politically uncomfortable weathering the backlash sure to come from the Hawkish right.

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Spectator Defends Government Spending, Says Civil Servants are Efficient and Necessary

November 16th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

It’s amazing how much money that so-called fiscal conservatives are willing to lavish on the armed services. The Parallax Brief believes our armed forces are grossly underfunded and overstretched for Britain’s current foreign policy brief, but what always shocks him is the willingness of those who spend the vast majority of their time engaged in a monotonous, aggressive siege of what they see government largesse (that is, all government spending) to not only join him in being against military cutbacks, but to argue that any it’s wrong to even question MoD spending.

Here, for instance, is the Spectator’s Daniel Korski who — and perhaps sit down now, because you might faint when you read what follows — criticised on Sunday on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog Liam Fox for wanting to reduce the size of the MoD’s civilian (civil servant) contingent.

“Liam Fox has made clear that the Conservative Party is planning to slash the number of civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence as a way of balancing the military budget if they win the general election in 2010. “We have 99,000 people in the Army and 85,000 civilians in the MoD. Some things will have to change – and believe me, they will,” Fox has said.

[But]…MoD civilians include “doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, lecturers, policemen, security guards, Royal Fleet auxiliary sailors, intelligence analysts”. Many of these people would be considered essential frontline servabts if they worked elsewhere in government. Seeing them as bonus-craving, army-destroying time-wasters is wrong.

In fact, if the MoD axed its entire civilian workforce it would save no more than 2.7 billion pounds in pay pensions and other costs. By comparison, armed forces’ costs amount to 8.9 billion pounds.

While the MoD is clearly in need of reform, and the public can be counted to react in a pavlovian way to the juxtaposition of the number of civilian employees and military personnel, this is hardly the zero-sum issue it is made out to be. Nor is it a major strategic concern for UK defence.

The Parallax Brief was still in the process of preparing a stiff brandy to soften the shock of reading a Spectator journalist defending slothful, incompetent civil servants who could never find work in the private sector, when he read Spectator deputy editor James Forsyth on Obama’s Afghanistan dilemma.

“A report in the New York Times today suggests that the administration is now worried about the cost of sending more troops. The paper says that Obama is insisting that every option contains a quick exit strategy as part of an effort to keep costs down. When you consider the likely cost of many of Obama’s domestic priorities, especially health-care, it seems remarkable that he is so concerned about the costs of the Afghan mission.”

Let’s get this straight, then: The Spectator is now for government spending, and civil servants, who are now underpaid and overstretched, and against government carefully analysing costs against benefits?

If the Spectator was genuinely fiscally conservative, then there would be blog entries on the Coffee House supporting the decision to cut back on the MoD’s civilian contingent and Obama’s concerns about the cost of war.

By the Spectator’s own numbers, cutting even 5% of the civil servants working at the MoD would save GBP135,000,000. Given that there are currently 23,000 civil servants working for the MoD’s procurement wing, a staggering three times more than were needed for the job during the second world war, are cutbacks really unwarranted?

Is there any other department of state which can count on the Spectator’s support in this way?

The Parallax Brief suggests that if, say, Andrew Lansley said GBP135 mn could be saved by trimming civil servants and managers working in the NHS, those defending NHS bureaucracy would be ridiculed by the Spectator.

And would Obama be criticised by the Spectator for considering the cost-benefit dynamic of a new extension of education policy?

A question, then: Are James Forsyth, Daniel Korski and the Spectator true fiscal conservatives who genuinely want government spending to be lowered and government to be more efficient, or do they just want spending on services that help poor people to be slashed so rich people can keep most of their money?

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“I will kill 10 of these people for each IED we find”

November 14th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Gordon Brown was on the Today Program on Radio 4 on Friday talking about a strategy for Afghanistan involving training the Afghan forces — police and army — to be able to take charge of their own country. It’s perhaps worth looking at just how much time and effort will be required.

This is how policing works in Afghanistan. An American mine-proof vehicle is disabled by an improvised explosive device fabricated by the Taliban. At the behest of the NATO forces, the Afghan police are sent in to investigate further. The police don’t really investigate, but instead start picking on individual villagers to find out who the local Taliban are. Their techniques involve bribing children for information, the threat of torture, and threatening to kill 10 of the villagers for each IED found

Watch it:

Not exactly Dixon of Dock Green.

No wonder the Taliban is making gains. The Parallax Brief might run into the arms of the local fanatical, brutal Mullah-with-a-Kalashnikov if faced with cops like that.

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Operation Panther’s Claw a Success, But Will NATO now Follow the Soviet Strategy?

November 12th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The BBC website has a nice info-graphic depicting Operation Panther’s Claw, the British led operation to wrest control from the Taliban an area along the Helmand River the size of the Isle of Wight. It’s worth a visit for a cursory overview of the operation, which the defence chiefs have hailed it a success.

But the Parallax Brief wonders for how long? NATO seems thus far to have been pretty successful when it comes to defeating the Taliban in battle, but less so when it comes to holding the gains. Too often, a village is hard won, only to fall back into Taliban hands as soon as the troops leave to free another area.

According to the fascinating Ghosts of Alexander blog, which the Parallax Brief found via Matthew Yglesias, the major policy debate in Washington is now whether to follow the strategy the Soviet’s settled on in the end — which would involve additional troops to take control and hold onto the urban areas and the road that circles the country, with a lighter footprint in the countryside — and if so, how many population centres will it be necessary to hold to control the whole country. The blog entry really is essential reading for anyone interested in a detailed look at the main debating areas in Afghan policy.

To get a picture what the USSR managed to achieve using this strategy, the map below indicates with shading the areas the Red Army held at the end.

It’s clear that there were still chunks of the ring road that the Red Army couldn’t quite get to grips with, but it strikes the Parallax Brief that NATO could probably make this plan work where the Soviets couldn’t. First, the NATO countries, even during the crisis, are in far better economic shape than the 1980s USSR. Second, NATO is isn’t fighting an enemy being pumped by America with billions of dollars of advanced weaponry and training. Finally, NATO’s training and more modern technology should make COIN warfare easier to execute.

So it could work. But what about the agricultural areas? Will a version of Joe Biden’s light footprint plan work there? Or will gains in the countryside be lost as quickly as they’ve been gained.

That these questions of policy are still unanswered — and the fact that even if they were the troops required for their successful execution might not be forthcoming — is extremely alarming. But that’s not what our real concern about Afghanistan should be. Because the astonishing truth of Afghanistan is that there still isn’t a firm idea of what would constitute victory, let alone the strategies to use to get there.

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Is There Any International Dispute for which the Diplomatic Solution Wouldn’t be Like Appeasing Hitler?

November 12th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

If hoary clichés are sin number one for journalists, “like appeasing Hitler” must appear near top of the no-go list. It is wheeled out by an almost incomprehensible number of slothful journalists on the brink of, and during, every single conflict. It really is indicative of a lazy mind that is satisfied with vapid comparisons which are wholly unable to stand up even to the most cursory historical scrutiny.

(That’s quite apart from the question of whether appeasement was the enormous tactical blunder it’s made out to be, which isn’t the open and shut history it’s been made out as.)

Scores of wars have been justified on the basis that not waging them would be “like appeasing Hitler” , the escalation of diplomatic conflicts has been urged using the same line, and a litany of tyrants, despots and third world strong men have been labelled by an asinine western press corps as “the new Hitler”

The Parallax Brief’s toes curled, therefore, when he read at CentreRight today the headline “Withdrawing from Afghanistan would be like appeasing Hitler”.

The article itself has some interesting insight into life under the Taliban and the consequences of withdrawal (whether you agree with them all or not, they’re interesting).

But really, Britain’s reaction to a nasty, chaotic religious theocracy armed with Kalashnikovs, RPG-7s and Toyota pick up trucks, ruling over a barren, rocky hell-hole thousands of miles away in the Hindu Kush has literally nothing to do with its reaction to a major European power taken over by a man with the will and resources to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale and bring all of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals under his heel, including our own country.

Really: nothing.

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Jamie Janes: The Courageous, Honourable Young Man the News Forgot

November 11th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief is tired of posting on the tawdry Jamie Janes letter story. It’s starting to feel awfully like reversing back over the fluffy kitten you just knocked down, and if he writes any more on the matter,he’s going to feel so sullied he’ll have to scrub himself with a brilo pad when he takes a shower tonight.

So, this will be the last post on the story, and to sign off there are two points that need to be made.

First, the Parallax Brief desperately hopes that Britain is not going down the American route where slobbering, populist right wing media outlets snarl their way through the 24 hour news cycle, and are astonishingly successful in setting the agenda for the more moderate news channels. It is now commonplace for fanatically partisan outlets like Murdoch-owned Fox News, and blog the Drudge Report to set the news agenda for CNN, NBC and the rest.

The way the BBC has led with JanesGate suggests it might be.

Second, what has been lost — and tragically, unforgivably so — is that Jamie Janes was a young man who did what most of us would never contemplate or even conceive. He was brave and honourable enough to offer his life in the service of his country. He is a real life hero: a hard, fit, courageous young man who who died so the people he was fighting wouldn’t get a chance to take on softer, fatter, more cowardly people like the Parallax Brief here in the UK.

Yet amid the he-said-she-said slime of this whole affair, this young man’s awesome sacrifice has been utterly forgotten.

On this day of remembrance, perhaps we should spend a moment considering what Mr. Janes did and give thanks that there are still young men with his constitution in this land.

If you would like to pay tribute to this hero, the Parallax Brief has found this site that might be worth a visit: http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/tribute/janes/3162087

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Brown Deserves Some Slack Over Misspelled Letter to Soldier’s Mother

November 9th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Hapless Gordon Brown finds himself under fire again today, this time for numerous spelling errors in a letter he wrote to the bereaved mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan, including misspelling the name of the deceased soldier and another part in which a letter had been crossed out.

The Guardian reports:

Brown also issued a statement apologising for “any unintended mistake” and saying sorry to other bereaved families who may have had difficulty reading his handwriting.

Jacqui Janes, the mother of Grenadier Guardsman Jamie Janes, who was killed in Afghanistan on 5 October, received the letter days after her son’s death. But, according to a story in today’s Sun, Janes had only read the first few lines before she “threw it across the room in disgust”.

The Parallax Brief feels sympathetic for both parties in this sad case. First, any letter of this type — even one flawlessly crafted using elegant copperplate handwriting and graceful prose — is as likely as not to be greeted with disdain in these circumstances. What’s it worth to her, when she’s just been utterly devastated by the loss of her flesh and blood? She would probably have viewed it as an empty platitude anyway.

The Parallax Brief cannot imagine the pain she is experiencing because her son was showed the honour and courage to serve his country.

But second, the Prime Minister is at least attempting to do the right thing by personally writing a letter to each and every family who has lost a loved one in Afghanistan, rather than palming it off to a minion, or sending out a slightly altered typed letter. Do other world leaders do likewise?

Further, Brown’s handwriting, according to the Guardian, is atrocious as a result of his poor eyesight, which also forces him to use a felt tip. It can’t be right to score political points from his disabilities, can it?

It all adds up to one of the few (perhaps the only?) occassion(s) in which the Prime Minister deserves some slack. Certainly, it’s not an issue that should be used to score political points.

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Is Depriving Afghanistan to Terrorists a Sensible Reason to Wage War?

November 9th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

John Redwood on his excellent blog on Saturday posed a very interesting question: “Does the war in Afghanistan make us safe in the UK?” The Parallax Brief thought he didn’t flesh out his argument enough, or take it to its logical conclusion, and later gets into analysis of COIN warfare that he probably isn’t qualified to offer, but Mr. Redwood did make some interesting points.

“They go on to say that we need to fight in Afghanistan because some terrorists are trained there, and because the terrorist plotters in the UK often have links there. They link Afghanistan to Pakistan by calling the area the border badlands. Under questioning, they admit that most of the training and links are to the Pakistan side of the border, rather than the Afghanistan side. They seek to imply that the position in Pakistan would get worse if we removed troops from Afghanistan.

This argument will not wash.”

Let’s push aside for a moment the truth that British boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan act as a recruitment clarion for extremist and terrorist organizations, as well as putting Britain firmly near the top of the list of hated enemies for every lunatic Muslim terrorist.

More to the point would be to ask where terrorist attacks are planned, where are they undertaken, from where to the terrorists hail, and where are they indoctrinated? It strikes the Parallax Brief that the answer to all these questions is very unlikely to be Afghanistan or the mountainous west of Pakistan. It is actually far more likely to be Bradford, London, Paris or Hamburg.

This is borne out by fact: 9/11 was mostly planned in Hamburg (and while the Parallax Brief is sure downtown Hamburg rocks on a Saturday night, it probably isn’t quite yet in need of NATO troops to maintain order). Meantime, the 7/7 London Bombings were carried out by British citizens. And the 9/11 attackers took flying lessons in America.

Terrorists don’t need Afghanistan or the lawless tribal Af-Pak border region.

That’s because it doesn’t take a the space afforded by a sympathetic country in the Hindu Kush to radicalize a young man and then teach him how to let go of a dead man’s switch. Besides which, Al-Qaeda is a highly decentralized organization in which the various cells rarely contact eachother and where individuals in the same cell might not even be aware of one another.

If our heroes are fighting and dying in Afghanistan to deny the country to terrorists, then it is indeed a deeply flawed logic that has sent them to fight on foreign fields, and shows an asinine lack of thought on behalf of their leaders.

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