How Obama reached his decision on Afghanistan

The New York Times has a long but interesting chronicle of the decision-making path President Obama took on the way to sending a big infusion of troops to Afghanistan. Good reading for a Sunday afternoon.

Thomas Friedman's foreign policy

Thomas Friedman has a great column that describes his common sense foreign policy beliefs, all of which argue against Obama's surge in Afghanistan.

My sense is that all of the people I hear speaking in opposition to Obama's plans are making a good case for their point of view, but they're arguing the wrong case. I don't believe sending more troops to Afghanistan is about Afghanistan. It's about Pakistan. But since the President is constrained in what he can say about Pakistan (because what we're doing there upsets Pakistanis on the street, and the Pakistani military is worried about what we might do), we have this whole discussion about the merits of "nation-building" and whatnot in Afghanistan. (Again, I recommend listening to Ted Koppel's "Talk of the Nation" interview regarding this topic.)

I guess this is one good reason that the framers put the executive rather than the legislative branch in charge of foreign policy...

One more try in Afghanistan

I find myself deeply conflicted about the war in Afghanistan and Obama's plans for ending it with a better outcome than simply bringing the troops home today. Underneath all of the talk about Afghanistan, my sense is that we're staying there mainly in order to maintain pressure on the forces that would de-stabilize Pakistan. And that is, after all, the only real danger (and even then, certainly not an "existential" one): the possibility of terrorists getting there hands on one or more of Pakistan's nukes.

We can't stay there indefinitely... we can no longer afford such an expedition. Perhaps the best we can do is stay for now, double down, and re-assess in a year and a half.

Andrew Sullivan wrote a thoughtful post on the President's strategy, which ultimately can be summed up as "one more try."

Ted Koppel on the war in Afghanistan

Neal Conan talked to Ted Koppel yesterday about the war in Afghanistan in advance of President Obama's address to the nation tonight. Koppel's thoughts on Obama being in an impossible situation--trapped between the domestic political reality and the multi-generational danger of a destabilized Pakistan--are worth a listen (or a read, the transcript is available at the same link).

JUAN COLE, meanwhile, writes about the lack of a functioning Karzai government in Afghanistan.

Moral dilemma for our times: drone warfare

I've been worried about the moral and practical implications of relying on robots rather than soldiers for three years now (an old post here). Roger Cohen is on the same wavelength in his latest New York Times op-ed piece, and Jane Mayer has a recent article in The New Yorker which I'm reading now.

From Cohen's op-ed:

When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more than 12,000....

But as [Jane] Mayer notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

These are targeted international killings, no less real, and indeed more insidious, for their video-game aspect. The thing about robotic warfare is you can watch people get vaporized on a screen in Langley, Virginia, and then drive home for dinner with the kids. The very phrase “go to war” becomes hard to distinguish from going to work. That’s a conflation fraught with ethical danger. The barriers to war get lowered.

President Obama has apparently ordered as many Predator drone strike in his nine months in office as George W. Bush did in his last three years as president. That's not the kind of change I voted for.

UPDATE

I finished the Mayer article. An excerpt:

Peter W. Singer, the author of “Wired for War,” a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern combat, argues that the drone technology is worryingly “seductive,” because it creates the perception that war can be “costless.” Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences. Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen. In contrast to Gaza, where the targeted killing of Hamas fighters by the Israeli military has been extensively documented—making clear that the collateral damage, and the loss of civilian life, can be severe—Pakistan’s tribal areas have become largely forbidden territory for media organizations. As a result, no videos of a drone attack in progress have been released, and only a few photographs of the immediate aftermath of a Predator strike have been published....

Critics have suggested that unmanned systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has called “a virtueless war,” requiring neither courage nor heroism.... Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost. As she puts it, “Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war.”

The article is worth a read considering the number of strikes and hundreds of people who are dying... they're not all terrorists, folks. What kind of people are we to simply turn a blind eye to a war being waged remotely in our names?

Also in the Mayer article, a quote from former Army Ranger Andrew Exum:

There’s something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and-blood investment if we go too far down this road.

But on the other hand...

I completely agree with Pakistani (and Afghani) outrage over U.S. drone attacks that kill civilians. Secretary of State Clinton sat down with some Pakistanis to hear their concerns but didn't seem to acknowledge their validity.

Hillary lays it out: You don't know where Al Qaeda is? Really?

In a newconference in Pakistan today, Secretary of State Clinton was blunt that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship is a "two-way street" and expressed doubt that Pakistan's military didn't know where Al Qaeda was hiding and couldn't go after them if they wanted to.

You go, girl.

More here.

News from the stairclimber...

Things that caught my eye while I was doing cardio:

• Lithium batteries (think laptops, cell phones, etc.) are causing more and more fires on airplanes. Given the danger, I can imagine them being the next thing that some terrorist exploits as an improvised explosive device. (Oddly enough, the government's "Safe Travel" website still highlights a change in the air travel rules regarding lithium batteries that went into effect almost two years ago!)
• I knew that with ten gazillion channels on cable that individual shows weren't receiving nearly as many viewers as they used to... but these numbers for the cable news programs blew my mind:

  [Fox News'] 7p.m. show, anchored by Shepard Smith, regarded as a nonideological program, dwarfs every CNN show in prime time.

  In October, Mr. Smith averaged 465,000 viewers among the 25- to 54-year-old audience that news sells to advertisers. Lou Dobbs on CNN was fourth in the hour, with 162,000, edged by Ms. [Jane] Velez-Mitchell on HLN with 166,000. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and “Hardball” was second with 179,000 viewers.

  At 10 p.m., Mr. [Anderson] Cooper had 211,000 viewers, to 223,000 for Mr. [Keith] Olbermann’s repeat. Ms. [Greta] Van Susteren had 538,000 viewers, and Ms. Grace averaged 222,000.

  For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers, ages 25 to 54. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000 viewers.

  A few hundreds of thousands of viewers in a country of roughly 300 million!!!
• This New York Times article on Pakistan makes me feel "realpolitiky" all over. Sometimes it's hard to hold onto the notion that there's any common ground left in the world... (and sometimes it sadly feels that way at home, too).
• Finally, David Brooks worries about the Obama administration overreaching in an attempt to engineer solutions to the nation's problems, with capping executive pay as one example:

  Furthermore, when extending federal authority, the Obama folks never seem to ask how Republicans will use this power when they regain the White House. The Democrats trust themselves to set private-sector salaries and use extralegal means to go after malefactors, but would they trust a future Dick Cheney?

  I hope they know what they’re doing. Because when a future Cheney comes into office, I’m pretty sure he’ll be coming after columnists’ salaries first.

  At least he got in a Dick Cheney dig.

News bites

The EPA plans to step up enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

The Karzai goverment admits that a runoff election in Afghanistan is now likely, possibly late this month or early next month.

And authorities in Pakistan have increasing concerns about the wave of attacks there.

Hubris in Pakistan: they were warned about attack

From the New York Times:

The mastermind of the militant assault on Saturday that shook the heart of the Pakistani military was behind two other major attacks in the last two years, and the police had specifically warned the military in July that such an audacious raid was being planned, police and intelligence officials said Sunday.

The revelation of prior warning was sure to intensify scrutiny of Pakistan’s ability to fight militants, after nine men wearing army uniforms breached the military headquarters complex in Rawalpindi and held dozens hostage for 20 hours until a commando raid ended the siege. In all, 16 people were killed, including eight of the attackers, the military said.

The surviving militant, who was captured early Sunday morning, was identified as Muhammad Aqeel, who officials said was a former soldier and the planner of this attack and others. Mr. Aqeel, who is also known as Dr. Usman because he had once worked with the Army Medical Corps before dropping out about four years ago, is believed to be a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

The army has been promising to fight back against the fierce Taliban insurgency holed up in the tribal region of South Waziristan amid pressure from the Obama administration, which is about to secure a major aid package that would give $1.5 billion a year to the government here.

The attack on the headquarters was a signal that the Taliban insurgency had penetrated deeply into Punjab Province, where the military headquarters are located, and was no longer confined to the wild tribal areas that serve as the operational center for the Pakistani Taliban.

Pakistani Taliban's demands

Juan Cole comments on this weekend's takeover by militants of Pakistan's military headquarters; there are also a couple of videos from Pakistan.

Pakistan's "Pentagon" attacked

It's frightening that a group of Taliban gunmen could attack Pakistan's military headquarters and hold out against government forces for nearly a day. It makes you wonder about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons facilities.

American military officials, some of whom were glued to Pakistani television as the events unfolded, said they were astonished that the militants could penetrate the high-security installation to the extent that they did. Even if the military brings the situation under control, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, the siege represents “a major security lapse....”

The daring attack on the headquarters, the most sensitive area in Pakistan which serves as the Pakistani equivalent of the Pentagon, came after the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, warned that the army had become the militants’ main target.

More troubling news from Pakistan

Apparently they began a nuclear arms buildup in the past few years of the Bush administration, which looked the other way:

... Pakistan is producing an unknown amount of new bomb-grade uranium and, once a series of new reactors is completed, bomb-grade plutonium for a new generation of weapons. President Obama has called for passage of a treaty that would stop all nations from producing more fissile material — the hardest part of making a nuclear weapon — but so far has said nothing in public about Pakistan’s activities.

Bruce Riedel, the Brookings Institution scholar who served as the co-author of Mr. Obama’s review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, reflected the administration’s concern in a recent interview, saying that Pakistan “has more terrorists per square mile than anyplace else on earth, and it has a nuclear weapons program that is growing faster than anyplace else on earth.”

Worst of all is the proximity of some of their nuclear facilities to unstable regions of the country:

The dimensions of the Pakistani buildup are not fully understood. “We see them scaling up their centrifuge facilities,” said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which has been monitoring Pakistan’s continued efforts to buy materials on the black market, and analyzing satellite photographs of two new plutonium reactors less than 100 miles from where Pakistani forces are currently fighting the Taliban.

“The Bush administration turned a blind eye to how this is being ramped up,” he said. “And of course, with enough pressure, all this could be preventable.”

MORE ON THE FIGHTING, refugees, and other developments in Pakistan from Juan Cole.

The benefit of the doubt

I'm willing to give President Obama just that: the benefit of the doubt. As he confronts the difficulties and confounding shades of gray of governing--as contrasted with the clarity of campaigning--I know that he will make decisions that don't make everyone happy.

And "No, Ryan," I'm not cynical over DADT as I never expected Obama to turn over the ban on gays serving in the military right away.

My one issue: we can't kill civilians so blithely. If we're going to use our military in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they have to stop killing so indiscriminately. On that I'm unwilling to let Obama off the hook.

Refugees in Pakistan

I knew that things were heating up in Pakistan, but I didn't really understand the scale until I heard on the radio this past week that there were an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 people who were forced out of their homes by the fighting.

You can help by donating to Mercy Corps here.

Danger in Pakistan

The Pakistani Taliban is consolidating control of the Buner district, just 70 miles from Pakistan's capital:

Last year when the militants encroached into Buner, killing policemen, the local people fought back and forced the militants out. But now, with a beachhead in neighboring Swat and a number of training camps for fresh recruits, the Taliban was able to carry out what amounted to an invasion. A local politician, Jamsher Khan, said by telephone: “We felt stronger as long as we thought the government was with us, but when the government showed weakness, we too stopped offering resistance to the Taliban.”

The advance had been building for weeks, with the assistance of sympathizers and even a local government official who was appointed on the recommendation of the militants, a senior law enforcement official said. But Buner’s final capitulation was rapid.

On Wednesday, officials and residents said that heavily armed Taliban militants had begun patrolling villages and that the local police had retreated to their station houses in much of the district. Staff members of local nongovernmental organizations had been ordered to leave, and their offices were looted, residents said. Pakistani television news channels showed Taliban fighters triumphantly carrying office equipment out of the offices of the organizations.

I've read that one of the methods that Pakistan uses to secure its nuclear warheads is keeping the various components in separate locations, but that they've been reluctant to share those locations with the U.S. More on that here.

Pakistan... are we too late?

With Obama we finally seem to have a president who understands the risk that a failed state in Pakistan would represent. But after reading this article, I'm worried that Bush may have wasted too much time in Iraq and that it may be too late for Pakistan:

Some analysts here [Islamabad] and in Washington are already putting forward apocalyptic timetables for the country. “We are running out of time to help Pakistan change its present course toward increasing economic and political instability, and even ultimate failure,” said a recent report by a task force of the Atlantic Council that was led by former Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The report, released in February, gave the Pakistani government 6 to 12 months before things went from bad to dangerous.

A specialist in guerrilla warfare, David Kilcullen, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when General Petraeus was the American commander in Iraq, offered a more dire assessment. Pakistan could be facing internal collapse within six months, he said.

General Petraeus, in Congressional testimony last week, called the insurgency one that could “take down” the country, which is home to Qaeda militants and has nuclear arms.

What's going on in Pakistan

Juan Cole summarizes the risks in Pakistan on Informed Comment. He's not concerned about the Taliban taking over. The real danger, he says, is that disagreements between the two major political parties could result in the country being partitioned.

The Pakistani Taliban are not going to take over the Pakistani government. That worry doesn't keep me up at night. They are small, and operate in a rugged, remote area of the country. They can set off bombs and be a destabilizing force. But a few thousand tribesmen can't take over a country of 165 million with a large urban middle class that has a highly organized and professional army.

In contrast, the increasingly rancorous conflict between the left of center, largely secular Pakistan People's Party and the right of center, big-landlord Muslim League, has the potential to tear the country apart.

He goes on to say:

For Pakistan's two major civilian parties, who only 7 months ago rid the country of a military dictator, to go mano a mano at each other like this is potentially tragic. If they destabilize the country, they could tempt the military to come back out of the barracks and make yet another coup. Short of that, there could be faction-fighting in villages and cities.

Pakistan is a nuclear state, so this degree of instability is especially worrying. The danger is not a take-over by the Taliban, but rather a coup (led by whom of what views?) or blood in the streets.

More troops for Afghanistan

Obama has approved 17,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, the true central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. If we're ever going to find Osama bin Laden, it will be in or around Afghanistan, not Iraq!

The order will add nearly 50 percent to the 36,000 American troops already there. A further decision on sending more troops will come after the administration completes a broader review of Afghanistan policy, White House officials said.

Mr. Obama said in a written statement that the increase was “necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.”

At least for now, Mr. Obama’s decision gives American commanders in Afghanistan most but not all of the troops they had asked for. But the decision also carries political risk for a president who will be sending more troops to Afghanistan before he has begun to fulfill a promised rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Many experts worry that Afghanistan presents an even more formidable challenge for the United States than Iraq does, particularly with neighboring Pakistan providing sanctuary for insurgents of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The latest in Pakistan

The Pakistani government has gone along with a plan by which the Swat region of Pakistan will be allowed to impose Sharia (Islamic law). This area happens to be just about 100 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan's capitol.

The U.S. government has publicly called this a "negative development" but apparently is privately supporting it as a way to drive a wedge between rival Taliban factions.

President Barack Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan voiced the greatest concern about the strength of Taliban militants in Swat as he ended his first visit to the region since taking up his post.

"I talked to people from Swat and they were, frankly, quite terrified. Swat has really deeply affected the people of Pakistan, not just in Peshawar but in Lahore and Islamabad," he said, while a Defence Department official described the deal as a "negative development".

On Tuesday night however, US officials in Islamabad privately backed the deal as an attempt to drive a wedge between Swat's Taliban, which is focused on its demand for Sharia law, and the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban led by Baitullah Mehsud, the notorious commander who controls much of North and South Waziristan and other tribal areas along the Afghan border.

While they expressed fears that the deal might yet be sabotaged by some Swat Taliban militants who support al-Qaeda, they said that if successful, the deal would break up the alliance between the two groups, which has caused alarm throughout Pakistan and in Washington.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Comments from Joe Klein at Time.