Ignatius Urges Focus on Pakistan

David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post. He makes some useful points in this column about Pakistan's need to gain control (Ignatius likes the term "sovereignty") over its own territory.

The problems with controlling the Pashtun on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border brings me back to the idea, bruited here some time ago, of creating a Pashtunistan, and then treating it as a separate country.

I said the other day that Afghanistan is a country without a nation. Like Belgium, where everyone except the king is either a Fleming or a Walloon, Afghanistan has no Afghans. Everyone is something else, and that something else is related to a population beyond the border. Pakistan is a little more coherent, but there are a lot more Punjabis, Sindis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns than there are Pakistanis.

The question I would have about controlling the NWFP (Northwest Frontier Province) and the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) is this: If it were possible for Pakistan to control these areas and integrate them into the national polity, would it be necessary? Or, conversely, if they need to make such an effort, are they capable of it?

An Appeal for Passion

Michael Gerson's article, on Obama's Afghan decision makes what I think is a very important point, although Gerson himself may not be fully aware of it: Reason doesn't motivate. President Obama's decision may be driven by reason and calculation, but it needs to be justified to the public and the military with feeling, with passion, with a bit of fervor.

So far, I think Gerson is right. People don't send their kids to war, they don't like to see kids sent to war, because it's the reasonable thing to do. They have to feel the rightness of the policy. So Mr. Obama does need to use his rhetorical gifts to sell the public on this war, as well as to show the military that he is committed to this policy.

However, when Gerson wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he used emotion, and Bush ended up as the most unpopular President since Nixon, and regarded by many as the worst President since James Buchanan. There are two problems with appeals to emotion:

First, emotion can be used to replace reason, to support policies that aren't really justified. One of the dangers here is that emotion can suppress debate, can prevent the consideration of reasoned alternatives.

Second, once the public and the military have been persuaded of the rightness of a course, once they are fully committed to the policy, the leaders lose their flexibility. If you look at the end of Vietnam, one of Richard Nixon's problems was that so many Americans looked at the negotiations with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong as a betrayal of the men and women who had died in the war. And those Americans were the ones who supported the war, the ones who enabled Nixon to maintain some momentum in Congress.

Appeals to emotion may be necessary to gain public support for an increasingly unpopular war, but if Obama takes that course, he may find himself riding the tiger of public opinion.

McKiernan's Fall and NATO in Afghanistan

This is a thoughtful article about the firing of General David McKiernan as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The author, "Spook 86," alludes to one of McKiernan's problems as the management of NATO forces in Afghanistan. He might have spent more time on that issue, because it is quite evident that reconciling the various countries's preferences has been close to impossible.

Tom Ricks, in his new book in Iraq, The Gamble, points out that one of the problems with the counterinsurgency doctrine promoted by General David Petraeus is that it virtually guarantees increased military casualties when first implemented. The mission of "protecting the population" is accomplished by placing troops between the population and the insurgents, thus virtually asking the insurgents to focus their attacks on the military. This may be the right way to fight this kind of war, but it may not be popular. Some Americans are remarkably blase about the deaths of Iraqi or Afghan civilians, but highly intolerant of the deaths of American soldiers.

The feeling now, unlike during the Clinton and early Bush administrations, is that the American people will tolerate a certain level of casualties, if the military effort appears to be succeeding. In other words, the public has an instinctual grasp of the military principle that one should never reinforce defeat. In the Afghan environment, successful counterinsurgency efforts will mean placing a lot of soldiers on foot patrol in Afghan villages, when many of them will be shot at, and some will be killed. This may be, I say again, the right way to proceed, but I don't see our German or Italian allies joining us in such an endeavor. High Noon is not in their cultural DNA.

Marching Toward Hell - A Review

Scheuer, Michael. Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq. New York, London, and Toronto: Free Press, 2008. xvi + 364 pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.00.

Michael Scheuer spent some twenty years in the CIA, including three years as head of Alec Station, the virtual station in Langley charged with intelligence on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He wrote two previous books, both published anonymously because Scheuer was still employed by CIA at the time. I have seen him a time or two on The Newshour on PBS discussing questions about terrorism. He is also a highly opinionated man who doesn’t seem to mind putting controversial views front and center. I say “seems” because Mr. Scheuer’s feeling were apparently hurt by criticism of his views as expressed in his earlier books.

Scheuer’s thesis is fairly simple, although both the evidence for it and his projected policy options to deal with have a number of ramifications. Scheuer restates his thesis a number of times in the course of the book. That thesis is that the Islamist groups who have attacked the United States and American interests are not motivated by some generalized hatred toward our lifestyle and our freedom. Indeed, polls taken in the Muslim world consistently show widespread approval of the American people and our way of life. Rather, these groups are motivated by dislike for a number of specific policies and actions which the United States has pursued over a period of many years.

I think I should say two things here. First, Mr. Scheuer is not saying that anything the United States might have done would justify terrorist actions. He is saying, however, that such actions may be motivated by other people’s perceptions of our polices and actions. Second, there is another book out recently, Choice of Enemies, which makes something of the same point, though at greater length and with more sophistication. The United States did not have to go to war against any of the Middle Eastern countries, nor were we forced to befriend any of them. We chose to support certain countries rather than others, and we have backed some regimes and tendencies within countries, at some cost to their rivals.

What are the policies and actions of the United States which have made us unpopular to the point that people all over the Muslim world believe that the killing of American soldiers and civilian is acceptable? Mr. Scheuer offers a list of six items:

1. The U.S. military and civilian presence in the Arab Peninsula
   
2. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel
   
3. U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India, and Russia
   
4. U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil and suppression of its price
   
5. U.S. military presence in the Islamic world – Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
   
6. U.S. support, protection, and funding of Arab police states.
   

Much of Marching Toward Hell is devoted to explicating this list, pointing out how our actions and policies appear to the residents of Muslim countries, and explaining why the United States has adopted such a self-defeating posture.

The first point is that, from a Muslim point of view, the United States declarations of support for democracy and freedom mean very little. Since the end of World War II, we have consistently supported military regimes, kingdoms, and dictatorships which have oppressed their own peoples. We have armed and re-armed Israel, and declared that we would never abandon Israel, when Israel has engaged in constant violence against Muslim people. But perhaps the worst thing is that we are there. We are present, in force, with bases in a number of Muslim countries, including parts of the Arabian peninsula which are regarded as sacred ground.

Mr. Scheuer tries to explain why we pursue these policies. I’m not sure that his explanations are sufficient, though they may contribute something to the debate. He strongly believes that we are losing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we will continue to lose wars in the Muslim world unless we get out of Cold War habits of thinking, try to understand the inhabitants of those countries, and disengage from local politics.

Scheuer contends that the Cold War casts a long shadow on U.S. military and political attitudes. One example is our tendency to try to find proxies to fight our wars for us. The failure of our Iraq policy may be attributed to the simple fact that Iraqis were not willing to kill other Iraqis (at least, Iraqis of the same confession) to forward our purposes. Similarly, I doubt that any Pakistani government will be able to sustain itself by cooperating in our mission to kill hundreds or thousands of Pakistani people. People helped us fight the Soviet Union because they believed that the Russians were evil, and there was plenty of evidence for that view. Scheuer doubts that we can persuade Muslims to believe that their fellow Muslims are evil.

This is partly due to a problem we have in much of the world. We don’t learn the local languages, we know nothing of the local cultures, we expect everybody to act just the way they do back home in Ashtabula. Do you think that the Iraqis are unaware of the contempt in which they are held by U.S. soldiers who speak no Arabic, and that they do not return that contempt in spades.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Scheuer recommends that we attend to American interests first and stop arming both sides in a religious war. Who is responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict lasting for 60 years? We are. And neither Israel’s interests nor those of the Saudis are identical to those of the United States.

No matter how you look at it, Michael Scheuer has written a contentious book. The prose isn’t always elegant, but his sincerity shines through. Sincerity is, of course, no guarantee that Mr. Scheuer is right. This book will anger some people, perhaps especially supporters of Israel. But it raises questions that are worth raising and discussing.

Strategic Errors and Errors of Ideology

Mr. Rodriguera accuses Mr. Obama's recent foreign trip of revealing two strategic errors. First, Mr. Obama is "naive" is expecting support from our European allies. I think Mr. Rodriguera has fallen for into the error of "Boltonism," the belief that it is better for the U.S. always to go it alone. There is a serious point here, one which Michael Scheuer makes much of in his book Marching Toward Hell. The Cold War was largely fought by proxy forces; with the exception of a few rumored Russian pilots over Korea, we never directly confronted our enemy. This was possible because the proxies - the ARVN, for example, had enough skin in the game to be fighting primarily for them, and only secondarily for us. Nowadays, it's harder to find that sort of proxy, and we've come to rely on mercenaries, some American and some foreign. Machiavelli pointed out the problems with mercenaries, to wit, if they're competent they're a danger to their employer, while if they're incompetent they are no danger to his enemies.

In the case of Afghanistan, I think that our allies are carrying part of the burden. Japan is paying the Afghan army's wages for six months, for example. It's just that only some of them are willing to put their combat troops into, well, combat. As long as they're used for jobs within the range of their abilities, they can be useful.

The second strategic error is our failure to attack Taliban strongholds sufficiently aggressively. For one thing, I think we've been aggressive enough to bring Pakistan to the brink of dissolution. To be more aggressive, we'd have to invade Pakistan.

I'm not sure yet, as I've just taken the matter under advisement, but I'm thinking that our strategic error in Afghanistan, and the only one that matters, is that we've been trying to establish a stronger central government than can be sustained by the political culture of the country. Perhaps our tendency to favor central governments over tribes is misplaced. When we started supporting and working with tribal forces in Iraq, we began to have some success. Maybe what we want in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is a weak central government with strong regional powers, which we could play off against each other. By setting up a strong central government, with a well-equipped army, we create a prize for the provincials to fight for.

If, for example, the Pakistani central government were weak enough, and the provinces strong enough, it would be a matter of no concern that the Taliban are moving into Buner. If they took Islamabad, it wouldn't be worth much to them, and the other provincial powers would probably unite to drive them out. Paris might be worth a mass, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to have Kabul worth a Friday prayer service.

A New Year Begins

Today is the first day of 2008. January 1, 2008, begins the world’s new year, and it begins my new year as well. This is my birthday, the anniversary of my birth, and it is a time of both beginnings and continuations.

Yesterday, by way of a New Year’s Eve celebration, we spent an afternoon and evening in the Middle East. First, over at the Cinemark multiplex, we saw The Kite Runner. This is an amazing movie. The story is compelling, with some subtle hooks in the plot to keep things moving along. The tale of the descent of Afghanistan from the imperfect, and sometimes violent, conditions of 1978, to the Hell of Soviet occupation and Taliban vigilantism is scathing. Over the 22 years of the story, everything and everyone good in Afghanistan is driven away or killed, and everything evil rises to greater and greater prominence. Or so it appears to our not-so-heroic hero, Amir, who ends up making a harrowing journey back to Kabul to rescue the child of his childhood playmate and servant.

This is a very, very good movie. One of the engaging touches is the constant juxtaposition, via flashbacks, of America (in the San Francisco version) against Afghanistan. The lives of Afghan refugees in the United States are illustrated, in all their frustration and hope, leaving one to wonder how many might have returned to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. The story is complex enough to keep one interested, and tense enough to bring one to the edge of one’s seat. The characters, at least the main ones, are complex enough to come across as real people.

Despite the fact that much of the film was shot in China, the manners, the landscape, and the urban settings of the movie reminded both of us of our days in Turkey. In fact, much of the dialogue, which I gather was in Farsi, contained recognizable words, such as “teshekkur” for “thank you.”

Another movie bearing on Afghanistan is Charlie Wilson’s War. I have not seen it yet. What I find interesting is that, taken together, the two movies may provide a compelling justification for our interventions in Afghanistan, while, at the same time, showing what the terrible consequences of foreign interference in that country have been. It all reminds me of my frustrations with a big book on the Middle East, to be dealt with in my May 2007 review.

We followed our virtual trip to Afghanistan with dinner at the Caspian Cafe, which, despite the name, is pretty thoroughly Mediterranean. The appetizer of Feta cheese, black olives, flat bread (lavosh), dried apricots, and almonds lacked only a glass of chai to make a Turkish breakfast. I had red snapper and scallops over basmati rice; Helen had chicken with artichokes.

It was an altogether enjoyable afternoon and evening, recalling some of the more interesting moments of our past. Now, as the new year starts, let us look forward to the future!