[Peace-discuss] Administration-controlled leaks

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's the real reason the Obama administration is so desperate to kill 
Wikileaks: they have to control the leaks. It's hard to read these as anything 
other than USG's groundwork for a possible take-over in Pakistan. Perhaps to be 
adumbrated in Obama's speech Thursday night? If so, the administration will be 
working furiously to prevent anyone's mentioning Nixon and Cambodia... 
Meanwhile, former dictator Musharraf says the Pakistani army may have to take 
charge. Note the limits of allowable debate in the US media: conservatives say 
we have to invade Pakistan, liberals say we can kill enough people in the region 
without doing that...]

NY Times December 14, 2010
Intelligence Reports Offer Dim Views of Afghan War
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to release a review of
American strategy in Afghanistan that will claim progress in the
nine-year-old war there, two new classified intelligence reports
offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance
of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from
havens on its Afghan border.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that
although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in
the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant
sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious
obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross
from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American
troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

The findings in the reports, called National Intelligence
Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16
intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were
provided last week to some members of the Senate and House
Intelligence Committees. The findings were described by a number
of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries.

American military commanders and senior Pentagon officials have
already criticized the reports as out of date and say that the
cut-off date for the Afghanistan report, Oct. 1, does not allow it
to take into account what the military cites as tactical gains in
Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in the south in the six weeks
since. Pentagon and military officials also say the reports were
written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited
time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war.

“They are not on the ground living it day in and day out like our
forces are, so they don’t have the proximity and perspective,”
said a senior defense official who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he did not want to be identified while
criticizing the intelligence agencies. The official said that the
30,000 additional troops that Mr. Obama ordered to Afghanistan in
December 2009 did not all arrive until September, meaning that the
intelligence agencies had little time to judge the effects of the
escalation. There are now about 100,000 American forces in
Afghanistan.

The dispute between the military and intelligence agencies
reflects how much the debate in Washington over the war is now
centered on whether the United States can succeed in Afghanistan
without the cooperation of Pakistan, which despite years of
American pressure has resisted routing militants on its border.

The dispute also reflects the longstanding cultural differences
between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential
bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote “can
do” optimism.

But in Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies play a strong role,
with the largest Central Intelligence Agency station since the
Vietnam War located in Kabul. C.I.A. operatives also command an
Afghan paramilitary force in the thousands. In Pakistan, the
C.I.A. is running a covert war using drone aircraft.

Both sides have found some areas of agreement in the period
leading up to Mr. Obama’s review, which will be made public on
Thursday. The intelligence reports, which rely heavily on
assessments from the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency,
conclude that C.I.A. drone strikes on leaders of Al Qaeda in the
tribal regions of Pakistan have had an impact and that security
has improved in the parts of Helmand and Kandahar Provinces in
southern Afghanistan where the United States has built up its
troop presence. For their part, American commanders and Pentagon
officials say they do not yet know if the war can be won without
more cooperation from Pakistan. But after years and billions spent
trying to win the support of the Pakistanis, they are now
proceeding on the assumption that there will be limited help from
them. The American commanders and officials readily describe the
havens for insurgents in Pakistan as a major impediment to
military operations.

“I’m not going to make any bones about it, they’ve got sanctuaries
and they go back and forth across the border,” Maj. Gen. John F.
Campbell, the commander of NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan,
told reporters last week in the remote Kunar Province of
Afghanistan. “They’re financed better, they’re better trained,
they’re the ones who bring in the higher-end I.E.D.’s.” General
Campbell was referring to improvised explosive devices, the
military’s name for the insurgent-made bombs, the leading cause of
American military deaths in Afghanistan.

American commanders say their plan in the next few years is to
kill large numbers of insurgents in the border region — the
military refers to it as “degrading the Taliban” — and at the same
time build up the Afghan National Army to the point that the
Afghans can at least contain an insurgency still supported by
Pakistan. (American officials say Pakistan supports the insurgents
as a proxy force in Afghanistan, preparing for the day the
Americans leave.)

“That is not the optimal solution, obviously,” said Bruce O.
Riedel, a former C.I.A. official and now a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, who led a White House review of Afghan
strategy last year that resulted in Mr. Obama sending the
additional forces. “But we have to deal with the world we have,
not the world we’d like. We can’t make Pakistan stop being naughty.”

Publicly, American officials and military commanders continue to
praise Pakistan and its military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
if only for acknowledging the problem.

“General Kayani and others have been clear in recognizing that
they need to do more for their security and indeed to carry out
operations against those who threaten other countries’ security,”
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan,
said last week.

But many Afghan officials say that the United States, which sends
Pakistan about $2 billion in military and civilian aid each year,
is coddling Pakistan for no end. “They are capitalizing on your
immediate security needs, and they are stuck in this thinking that
bad behavior brings cash,” said Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan
intelligence chief, in an interview on Tuesday.

The Pakistan intelligence report also reaffirms past American
concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, particularly the risk
that enriched uranium or plutonium could be smuggled out of a
laboratory or storage site.

The White House review comes as some members of Mr. Obama’s party
are losing patience with the war. “You’re not going to get to the
point where the Taliban are gone and the border is perfectly
controlled,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat
who serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Smith said there would be increasing pressure from the
political left on Mr. Obama to end the war, and he predicted that
Democrats in Congress would resist continuing to spend $100
billion annually on Afghanistan.

“We’re not going to be hanging out over there fighting these guys
like we’re fighting them now for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said.

Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.