[Peace-discuss] Fw: Serial Catastrophes in Afghanistan Threaten Obama Policy

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Subject: Serial Catastrophes in Afghanistan Threaten Obama Policy


> Serial Catastrophes in Afghanistan Threaten
> Obama Policy
> 
> by Juan Cole
> 
> Published on Monday, January 4, 2010 by Informed
> Comment 
> http://www.juancole.com/2010/01/serial-catastrophes-in-afghanistan.html
> Distributed by Common Dreams
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/04-3
> 
> 
> You probably won't see it in most US news outlets, but
> on Monday morning in Kabul and Jalalabad, hundreds of
> university students demonstrated against US strikes
> this weekend that allegedly killed a number of
> civilians [1]. I want to underline the irony that the
> students in Tehran University are protesting Mahmoud
> Ahmadinejad, while students in these two Afghan cities
> are calling for Yankees to go home. Nangarhar
> University in Jalalabad only has a student body of
> about 3200, so 'hundreds' of students protesting there
> would be a significant proportion of the student body.
> 
> The demonstrations could be a harbinger of things to
> come, but there was worse news. CIA field officers
> blown up, four US troops killed Sunday [2], and the
> rejection of most of the cabinet nominees by
> parliament, all signal rocky times ahead.
> 
> The past two weeks have seen the situation in
> Afghanistan deteriorate palpably, raising significant
> questions about the viability of the Obama-McChrysstal
> plan for the country. The chain of catastrophes has
> been reported in piecemeal fashion, but taken together
> these events are far more ominous than they might
> appear on the surface.
> 
> First, the US military launched a raid in Kunar
> Province two days after Christmas on a village a night,
> in which President Hamid Karzai alleged that 10
> civilians, some 8 of them schoolchildren, had been
> killed [3] (some say dragged out of their beds and
> executed). The NYT reported the head of a Kabul
> delegation [4] to the village saying,"They gathered
> eight school students from two compounds and put them
> in one room and shot them with small arms." (The
> spokesman is a former governor of Kunar and now a close
> adviser to President Hamid Karzai-- i.e. not exactly a
> pro-Taliban source). The charitable theory is that in a
> nighttime raid, US troops got disoriented and hit the
> wrong group of young men.
> 
> The outraged Afghan public saw this raid as an
> atrocity, and on Wednesday December 30, they mounted
> street protests against the US in Jalalabad, an eastern
> Pashtun city, and Kabul. In Jalalabad, hundreds of
> university students blocked the main roads [5], and
> then marched in the streets, chanting "Death to Obama"
> and "Death to America," and burning Obama in effigy.
> (If they go on like that, the anti-imperialist Pashtun
> college students of Jalalabad may attract the support
> of Fox Cable News . . .)
> 
> Even while the protests were taking place in Jalalabad
> and Kabul, a NATO missile strike on the outskirts of
> Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province [6] was alleged to have
> killed as many as 7 more civilians, some of them
> children. Now the Afghan public was really angry.
> 
> Then on Thursday, all hell broke loose when a
> high-level Pashtun asset [7] who had been informing to
> the CIA on the location of important al-Qaeda and
> Taliban operatives detonated a vest bomb at FOB Chapman
> in Khost province, a CIA forward base. The attacker
> killed 7 field officers and one Jordanian intelligence
> operative detailed to the base. Those experience field
> officers were on the front lines in the fight against
> al-Qaeda and their loss is a big blow to
> counter-terrorism. It is true that they had been drawn
> in to a campaign of assassination [8], but it is the
> president who gave them that task--unwisely, in my
> view.
> 
> The use of a double agent not only to misinform but
> actually to kill the most experienced counter-terrorism
> officers in the region showed the sophistication of
> tactical thinking in the Afghan insurgency.
> 
> The CIA's dependence on a double agent who finally
> openly betrayed them raises troubling questions about
> US strategy and tactics in the region. Such informants
> essentially direct CIA drone missile strikes.
> 
> You could imagine Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani
> Network in Khost and over the border in Pakistan's
> North Waziristan, inserting such a double agent into
> FOB Chapman and then using the CIA. For instance, what
> if a middling member of the Haqqani network launched a
> challenge to Siraj's leadership and that of his ailing
> father, Jalaluddin (an old-time ally of Reagan who was
> warmly greeted in the White House in the 1980s)?
> Wouldn't it be easy enough just to have the double
> agent tell the CIA that the challenger is a really bad
> guy in cahoots with al-Qaeda? Boom. Drone strike kills
> Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. In this way, Siraj
> could have used the US to eliminate rivals and become
> more and more powerful. And how many double agents have
> given up a few Arab jihadis who had fallen out with the
> Haqqanis, but then deliberately followed this up with
> bad intel on some innocent village, making the name of
> the US mud among the Pashtuns.
> 
> The drone strikes shouldn't be run by the CIA, and
> probably shouldn't be run at all. It could well be that
> savvy old-time Mujahidin trained in CIA tradecraft in
> the 1980s are having our young wet behind the ears
> field officers for lunch.
> 
> In short, is the bombing at FOB Chapman the tip of an
> iceberg of misinformation, on which the Titanic of
> Obama's AfPak policy could well founder?
> 
> Aljazeera English has video of these dramatic events
> leading up to the New Year [9], including the anti-US
> demonstrations, which looked big and significant to me
> on satellite television.
> 
> A soldier of the Afghan army shot an American soldier
> [10], further raising suspicions between the two
> supposed partners. Then a Canadian unit and embedded
> journalist were blown up.
> 
> There were more errant US strikes over the weekend,
> producing the demonstrations in Kabul and Jalalabad on
> Monday morning.
> 
> Then there were two other pieces of information coming
> out in the past few days that suggest all is not well.
> 
> First, a report on the Afghanistan Army threw cold
> water all over the idea that it could be enlarged and
> trained [11] to provide security in the country any
> time soon. High desertion rates, illiteracy, working
> half days, refusal to stand and fight against the
> enemy, and other factors just made that prospect
> remote. But such training, and the substitution of the
> Afghan National Army for NATO and US forces is the
> centerpiece of the Obama-McChrystal plan.
> 
> Finally, the Afghan parliament rejected 17 of the 24
> nominees to the cabinet offered by President Karzai.
> [12] The speaker of the House, Yunus Qanuni, supported
> Karzai's rival, Abdullah Abdullah, in August's
> presidential elections-- which many Afghans believe
> Karzai stole. This rejection was the Abdullah faction's
> chance to humiliate Karzai in revenge.
> 
> Aljazeera English has video on the rejection of 70
> percent of the cabinet [13], including the old time
> warlord of Herat, Ismail Khan, and a key women's
> affairs minister.
> 
> But the step means that we go into the winter with 17
> ministries headless. Having an increasingly competent
> Afghan government to partner with was another key
> element of the Obama plan. There is not one.
> 
> So, the US is killing schoolchildren far too often,
> enraging the Afghan public. It has provoked a studnet
> protest movement against it in Jalalabad and Kabul. Its
> informants are double agents. Its supposed partner, the
> Afghan army, mostly doesn't actually exist and couldn't
> be depended on to show up to anything important; and
> that is when they aren't taking potshots at US troops;
> and there is no Afghan government as we go into 2010.
> 
> President Obama may have a lot on his plate, but
> Afghanistan could make or break his presidency. If he
> doesn't view what has happened there while he was in
> Hawaii with alarm and begin thinking of alternative
> strategies, he could be in big trouble. 
> 
> (c) 2010 Juan Cole
> 
> Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian
> history at the University of Michigan. His most recent
> book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East [14]
> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been
> published. He has appeared widely on television, radio
> and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East
> affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has
> written, edited, or translated 14 books and has
> authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the
> contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment [15].
> 
> 
> Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 
> 
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