Enough With The Fake E-mails

Larry Johnson over at No Quarter tells us that the E-mail from Captain Jeffrey Porter is legit, but questions remain. It looks like quite a few bloggers have fallen for the old "viral E-mail" trick:

Which brings us to the letter from a young Captain apparently attached to the Utah National Guard. Jeffrey Porter, who authored the following letter, is in trouble. Officers are not supposed to take a political position. I believe he is telling the truth but his chain of command has stepped in and are denying his version. I believe Captain Porter was telling what he saw without intending it to become part of the political debate. I held off until now posting the letter because I wanted to be sure it was authentic. I have confirmation from friends in theater that it is legit.

Unfortunately, Porter's credibility was shattered almost immediately--not from "pressure" from his chain of command but, rather, from the fact that he wasn't even present when Obama visited Bagram, Afghanistan. From Snopes.com:



If you click here, it'll take you to the snopes page where more than a few doubts have been cast on the veracity of what Porter had to say. I refuse to believe a Captain in the United States Army doesn't know the boundaries and limits of what to say about a political candidate. If he doesn't know the boundaries and limits, he's the only one shuffling around in a fog of ignorance. I think that it's wrong to push this material at bloggers. This E-mail had a target audience, and the good Captain's friends and family weren't it.

The problem is that the E-mail that he sent was very savvy about what to say and how to say it so that it would cause maximum outrage and get forwarded to bloggers like Johnson who would republish it and amplify the message. Whether this is done to excite a liberal or conservative or libertarian blogger is not the issue--plenty of liberal blogs fall for this crap, too.

Here's how it starts--when these smears get started, someone with a pseudonym will usually post it on a forum board with some sort of military or conservative issue affiliation and then distance themselves from it. The post at this link occurs in pane #5 and then the post "distancing" the person who posted it follows shortly thereafter in pane #47.

The E-mail is as follows:

Hello everyone,
As you know I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to ‘The War Zone’. I wanted to share with you what happened.

He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle, got to the area to meet with the Major General (2 Star) who is the commander here at Bagram.

As the Soldiers were lined up to shake his hand he blew them off and didn’t say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General. As he finished, the vehicles took him to the ClamShell (pretty much a big top tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out in with weights) so he could take his publicity pictures playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk to Soldiers to thank them for their service

So really he was just here to make a showing for the American’s back home that he is their candidate for President. I think that if you are going to make an effort to come all the way over here you would thank those that are providing the freedom that they are providing for you.

I swear we got more thanks from the NBA Basketball Players or the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders than from one of the Senators, who wants to be the President of the United States . I just don’t understand how anyone would want him to be our Commander-and- Chief. It was almost that he was scared to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our great country.

If this is blunt and to the point I am sorry but I wanted you all to know what caliber of person he really is. What you see in the news is all fake.

In service,
CPT Jeffrey S. Porter
Battle Captain
TF Wasatch
American Soldier

The wording of this E-mail does not sound like an "off the cuff" observation, does it? A genuine observation would have been a little more even-handed or less calculating. Instead, it reads exactly like every other smear or hit piece perpetrated by the right wing, right down to the line about the Dallas Cowboys' Cheerleaders. The E-mail is too perfectly formed as a political attack to have been genuine. "Battle Captain" is a more informal term, not his actual position. CPT Porter likely works in an S-3 shop for an officer more senior to him. How is it possible that he didn't know he couldn't express himself like this? Why didn't he just ask his boss?

Here's Obama in Afghanistan--and this is the picture that the McCain campaign doesn't want you to see. The E-mail from CPT Porter was just a clumsy, ill-conceived attempt at ginning up phony outrage so that the sight of Obama being welcomed by US troops would be diminished in any way possible.



Here's the "retraction" of the E-mail:

Now the Bagram captain is dialing back, having signed the viral e-mail with his name, rank and unit - a possible violation of military regulations barring political statements. This morning, he sent The Mouth a new statement (punctuation corrected):

“I am writing this to ask that you delete my email and not forward it. After checking my sources, information that was put out in my email was wrong. This email was meant only for my family. Please respect my wishes and delete the email and if there are any blogs you have my email portrayed on I would ask if you would take it down too. Thanks for your understanding.”

An Army officer familiar with the incident told The Mouth today that the writer is “devastated that the letter was made public. It was never his intention that it go beyond members of his family.”

Is there anything even remotely "family oriented" about that E-mail? That's the most ludicrous thing about all of this--a perfectly worded smear directed at Barack Obama, obviously targeted to incite the anger of a military-oriented community was intended only for his family? You know, if I wrote my wife and said that the Dallas Cowboys' Cheerleaders were friendlier than Obama, I think the first thing I'd get back was a very pointed question of exactly how so? This is bullshit that deserves to be debunked.

I mean, honestly--would someone say this to their wife?

It was almost that he was scared to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our great country.

I'm sorry--I'm laughing my ass off at how earnest and transparent this bullshit really is. CPT Porter is too smart for his own fucking good, and his panicked withdrawal--his plea to have his E-mail deleted from blogs!--indicates to me that this was a smear gone wrong. As in, he got caught. Whoops! Next time, honey, remember to take my name off the bottom, okay?
We have to watch out for people who will spread these E-mails. And whether it's about Obama or McCain, the best thing to do is to take it with a grain of salt.

Frank Rich Takes John McCain to the Woodshed

You have to celebrate the moment when a prominent columnist actually does his or her job and points out just how ridiculous this campaign has become. We are enthralled with images and slights, attacks and smears when we should be focused on who has the best strategy to reduce the threat of terrorism and manage our economy. The two are intertwined, and Frank Rich nails it:

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.

In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.

Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

A vote for McCain is a vote for Gramm. And Gramm was so soundly rejected the last time he ran for President, you have to question the judgement of someone who would hire him to give advice on running for President. It's a wonder that it took this long for McCain to get rid of Gramm. Again, you come back to judgement.

--WS

Obama Lands in Afghanistan

Forget the security leaks from John McCain, Obama is in Kabul

Senator Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan early Saturday morning, opening his first overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to meet with American commanders there and later in Iraq to receive an on-the-ground assessment of military operations in the two major U.S. war zones.

Mr. Obama touched down in Kabul about noon, according to a pool report released by his aides. In addition to attending briefings with military leaders, he hoped to meet with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan before flying to Iraq later in the weekend.

His trip was cloaked in secrecy, which advisers said was due to security concerns set forth by the Secret Service. His whereabouts have been unknown since he departed Chicago. He left Andrews Air Force Base near Washington on Thursday afternoon, according to a pool report, and turned up in Afghanistan on Saturday.

This is the trip Obama needs for his foreign policy resume, but it will really amount to an extended dog and pony show, the kind McCain has specialized in ever since his stroll through the marketplace.

--WS

They Saw It Coming...

One of the things that has annoyed me about the coverage of the attack on our troops in Afghanistan that left nine dead is that the troops were never identified as being from the correct unit. The other thing that bothered me was--did the troops see this coming?

They did.

Cpl. Gunnar Zwilling suspected his days were numbered last week, while he and his band of brothers in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team prepared for a mission near Wanat, Afghanistan.

"It's gonna be a bloodbath," he told his father, Kurt Zwilling, on the phone, in what would be their last conversation.

Kurt Zwilling braced himself for the worst but held out hope that his son would make it home.

"They were in the most dangerous place on Earth. They were in mortal danger, and there was nothing they could do it about it," he said. "But they were soldiers, so they had to do their job."

With just a few days left in their 15-month tour, Gunnar Zwilling and eight of his comrades were killed July 13 in a clash with as many as 200 Taliban militants during a mission to set up an outpost near Wanat. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan in three years.

In the wake of their deaths, the paratroopers have become symbols of what many say is a forgotten war, prompting the U.S. military to draw up plans for putting more troops and resources into the war in Afghanistan.

Their base was overrun, and they saw it coming. That says it all.

We have lost something priceless.

--WS

Foreign Fighters Have Been Going Back and Forth For Years

The notion of people crossing borders is a reflection of the Western mindset--we see the crossing of an international boundary as an event! A legal instance of moving from one place to another! Something to be recorded! Write it down in a passport and stamp it! There! It's official!

It's not really a big deal for people who live in the Middle East--the borders were all drawn for them, not by them, and the idea that foreign fighters are moving into Afghanistan is new is laughable. Foreign fighters--so-called Jihadis--have always moved around, pointedly ignoring borders.

Afghanistan has been drawing a fresh influx of jihadi fighters from Turkey, Central Asia, Chechnya and the Middle East, one more sign that al Qaeda is regrouping on what is fast becoming the most active front of the war on terror groups.

More foreigners are infiltrating Afghanistan because of a recruitment drive by al Qaeda as well as a burgeoning insurgency that has made movement easier across the border from Pakistan, U.S. officials, militants and experts say.

Oh no! What are we going to do about it? We can calm down, for starters.

The problem with this thinking is that it ignores that this was going on in October, 2007:

The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies, officials on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border warn.

And it ignores what was happening in 2006:

Intelligence suggests that fighters from Syria, Egypt and Yemen have joined the Taliban in attacking the troops from the Nato International Security Assistance Force.

The recent assaults by the Taliban on British outposts in the north of Helmand province in Sangin, Musa Qala, Nowzad and Kajaki, were all believed to have been assisted by foreign fighters.

You can see the first inkling of this type of thing in 2005:

Last week the US magazine Newsweek reported that the Taliban in Afghanistan had brought in a team of instructors from Iraq to pass on the latest techniques.

Mr Jabr said hundreds of foreign militants had already left Iraq. Those remaining numbered fewer than 1,000, compared with up to 3,000 six months ago. But he said the fall was due to the success of recent US and Iraqi offensives

Notice anything?

This is the same recycling of the same panicky theme that gets trotted out when things start to go bad. Why wouldn't the "Jihadis" flock to Afghanistan? They do it every year, they get to do their Jihadi thing, and then they get to leave. It's called whack-a-mole by the carnies and that's what you have right now--a policy of fighting terrorism throughout the world played out as a panicky, ineffective game of whack-a-mole.

--WS

When Idiots Speak

Dean Barnett outdoes himself, trying to gin up enough phony outrage to look like a person of great import and seriousness.

If we had a “Most Offensive Quote of the Day” every day, Joe Biden would probably come to own the prize. But even by the senator’s lofty standards of chronic obtuseness, he outdid himself this afternoon:

“If John (McCain) wants to know where the bad guys live, come back with me to Afghanistan. We know where they reside. And it's not in Iraq.”

I know Democrats get a certain tingling in their thighs when their politicos talk butch in such a manner. Still, this comment is so over the top, somewhere in America Wesley Clark is probably feeling much better about his public relations acumen. What’s more, Biden’s comment turns what ought to be a serious conversation about two vital foreign theatres into a juvenile schoolyard taunt.

Barnett isn't upset that this was unfair or untrue--Barnett is upset because this is the accurate observation of a man who knows what he's talking about and has the facts on his side. Now, of course there are "bad guys" in Iraq. They're not the "bad guys" who attacked America though, are they? There are "bad guys" in Baltimore--when do we invade? There are "bad guys" in Myanmar--are we just going to sanction them or do we invade and bog down several dozen combat brigades? Leave it to a childish wingnut to think his phony outrage is enough to make a difference in an argument beyond his comprehension.

The people who gave aid and comfort and planned and carried out the attacks on 9/11 and on targets throughout the world ARE in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. They never were in Iraq. What is in Iraq are a completely different group of people who now oppose us and want to kill us. And the Bush Administration went into Iraq and caused us to lose focus, lose our military, and lose our way. They committed the greatest tactical and foreign policy blunder in the history of this nation.

Senator Biden is guilty of articulating that fact, nothing more.

And as more and more Americans wake up to that fact, the relevance of people like Barnett dissipates into nothing.

--WS

US Base Overrun in Afghanistan

This is a horrific example of what we face in Afghanistan. A significant body of Taliban troops has overrun a Forward Operating Base or outpost and has inflicted devastating casualties with small arms and RPGs.

Taliban insurgents killed nine US troops when they attempted to overrun an American base as bloody fighting broke out in several parts of Afghanistan today.

Nato reported that the small American Combat Outpost in Dara-I-Pech district of Kunar Province, on the border with Nuristan Province in the east of the country, came under heavy fire at around 4.30am local time. Heavy fighting continued throughout the day with US forces calling in artillery, fast jets and Apache helicopters.

Nato spokesmen warned of casualties "on both sides", and in the last few minutes it has emerged that nine American soldiers were killed, making it one of the biggest single losses in a day for the coalition since military operations began in the country.

"Insurgents have been firing at the COP with small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars using homes, shops and the mosque in the village of Wanat for cover," said a Nato statement.

All I can say after that is, holy shit. This is bad. No amount of spin can be used to mask what this means--our troops are in for a long fight in Afghanistan and the enemy are getting bolder and more dangerous.

--WS

Why the Military Can't Fix Equipment Fast Enough

According to a GAO report issued on July 8, the amount of equipment being sent to the five military repair depots is causing incredible strain on the system that repairs the equipment our military needs to sustain operations

The five Army depot maintenance activities support combat readiness by providing services necessary to keep Army units operating worldwide. From fiscal year 2004 through fiscal year 2007, the amount of new orders received to perform work increased from approximately $2.6 billion to $5.2 billion—about a 100 percent increase. These orders were to repair and overhaul a wide range of assets, including helicopters, such as the Apache and Blackhawk; combat vehicles such as the Abrams tank; air defense systems, such as the Patriot missile; electronics; and inventory items for the Army, other military services, and foreign governments. Many of these weapons systems are used to support the Army’s current effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. To perform the work needed in support of the Global War on Terrorism, the number of employees at the five depots increased from 12,983 to 15,717—a 21 percent increase—from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2007 and the number of direct labor hours of work increased from about 16.3 million in fiscal year 2004 to 24 million for fiscal year 2007—a 47 percent increase.

The five Army depots operate under the working capital fund concept, where customers are to be charged for the anticipated full cost of goods and services. To the extent that the depots do not complete work at year-end, the funded work will be carried into the next fiscal year. Carryover is the reported dollar value of work that has been ordered and funded (obligated) by customers but not completed by working capital fund activities at the end of the fiscal year.

The dramatic increase in "carryover" is the strain, and because we are running at full speed in Iraq and increasing our operations in Afghanistan, the carryover is only going to increase unless drastic action is taken to reduce that strain. I should also note--what "foreign governments" are putting strain on the system? I hope they need the gear to help us fight.

The following chart shows the growth--and the strain--that the military repair depots are under:



The reasons are pretty stark for this:

Our analysis of fiscal years 2006 and 2007 Army depot reports and discussions with depot officials identified four primary reasons for the significant growth in carryover. While some of these reasons are under the control of other DOD activities, such as customers not sending assets needing repair to the depots as planned, other reasons are within the depots’ control.

•First, the Army depot maintenance budget significantly underestimated the amount of new orders received from customers by about $1.7 billion and $1.5 billion for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, respectively. While the depots performed more work than budgeted during fiscal years 2006 and 2007, they could not keep pace with the increases in new orders.

•Second, the depots accepted new orders late in fiscal years 2006 and 2007 that could not reasonably be completed (and in some cases were not even started) prior to the end of the fiscal year.

•Third, our analysis of depot data and interviews with depot officials found that the depots experienced shortages in parts needed to perform their work in fiscal years 2006 and 2007.

•Fourth, based on our review of selected depot production reports on the status of work and discussions with depot officials, we determined that unserviceable assets (assets requiring repair) were not sent to the depots for repair as planned. Army officials informed us that in some cases the assets remained in-theatre (such as Iraq) for longer periods than planned.

I think it's outrageous that the planning was this bad. Obviously, "no one could have forseen" that we'd be tied down in two wars, one unsustainable and one escalating quickly out of control because of a lack of available US troops.

If one of these facilities is located near you, I would be willing to bet you that they're hiring and looking to expand. As the demand increases, the GAO indicated that these facilities have been adding personnel:

• Anniston performs maintenance on both heavy- and light-tracked combat vehicles and their components, such as the M1 Abrams tank.

•Corpus Christi Army Depot (Corpus Christi) overhauls, repairs, modifies, tests, and modernizes helicopters, engines, and components for all services and foreign military customers.

•Letterkenny Army Depot (Letterkenny) has tactical missile repair capabilities supporting a variety of DOD missile systems including the Patriot and its ground support and radar equipment. In response to the Global War on Terrorism, Letterkenny is rebuilding the High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV) that are returning from theater and is rebuilding them to a configuration that will support add-on armor.

•Red River Army Depot (Red River) performs maintenance, certification, and related support services on ground combat systems, air defense systems, and tactical wheeled vehicles. Systems supported include the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, Multiple Launch Rocket System, Small Emplacement Excavator, 5-ton dump truck, and HMMWVs.

•Tobyhanna uses advanced technologies to ensure the readiness of U.S. armed forces and is a full-service repair, overhaul, and fabrication facility for communications-electronics.

This last part is the part that probably bothers me the most--the lack of spare parts is absolutely killing our ability to repair and refurbish equipment and get it back to the troops. When you hear stories like thisabout how we found ourselves in urban combat with the wrong equipment or simply not enough of it and this story where a soldier complains about waiting months for "a handful of screws" , it indicates to me that we have never properly put this country on a wartime footing and used our manufacturing and industrial capabilities to supply the troops. What's lost in all of this is that if we invested in helping create or sustain a dozen or more companies that could manufacture and upgrade or retool and rehabilitate equipment, it would create jobs. It would be "pork barrel spending" to certain folks but it would be money well spent to sustain our military AND reduce the strain on these depots:

Our analysis of depot data and interviews with depot officials found that the depots experienced shortages of parts needed to perform their repair work in fiscal years 2006 and 2007. Our analysis of data in the critical maintenance repair parts reactive system11 at four depots showed that in 733 and 605 instances, repair parts shortages resulted in work stoppage in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, respectively. DLA and to a lesser extent Army Supply were the sources of supply for most of the repair parts. DLA officials told us that a major difficulty DLA faces as a supplier is forecasting the amount of repair parts needed when the depots’ types and numbers of repairs keep changing. Having a firm requirement (quantity of items to be repaired) early in the process is critical if DLA is to provide the spare parts to the depots when they need them. However, this has not always been the case. For example, as discussed later in this report, in November 2006, Red River accepted an order to overhaul 200 HMMWVs. Over the next 4 months, the order was amended first to decrease the quantity to 106 and then increase the quantity to 344. According to DLA officials, changing requirements, similar to this example, make it extremely difficult to forecast the spare parts needed for repairs. If DLA waits to buy the parts until the depot has a firm requirement, the parts might not be available when the depot needs them. On the other hand, if DLA buys the parts before the requirement is firm, DLA is at risk for excess inventory of parts when requirements for parts are significantly reduced.

Depots Could Not Obtain Parts Needed to Perform Repair Work as Scheduled

In order to perform the required repair work and help minimize the impact of parts shortages on depot operations, the depots have taken a number of actions to obtain parts when they were not available, including using parts from other assets, commonly referred to as robbing parts; fabricating the parts; and obtaining parts through the use of their local procurement authority, including the government purchase card. The following are examples of actions taken by the depots.

In October 2006, Anniston accepted a $5.6 million order financed with fiscal year 2007 operation and maintenance appropriated funds to overhaul 1,200 M2 machine guns. The work was originally scheduled to begin in March 2007. Because of the lack of parts, the work did not begin until July 2007 which resulted in more carryover than originally planned. About $5.4 million of the $5.6 million carried over from fiscal year 2007 into fiscal year 2008.

Because of the Global War on Terrorism and the surge in production of the M2s, Anniston had problems with obtaining parts to overhaul the machine guns since 2004. Because the depot could not get the needed parts from DLA or Army Supply, it used parts from other M2 machine guns. Some of these parts included the barrels, buffer body assemble, bolt, barrel extensions, breech locks, and receivers. Since the depot used parts from these 1,200 machine guns to repair machine guns in previous years, these 1,200 machine guns were missing parts. By the time the depot overhauled the 1,200 M2 machine guns, about half of the M2s had been totally stripped of their parts. An Army official stated that the machine guns going through overhaul were the “worst of the worst.” To perform the work, the depot had to buy new parts and have the Picatinny Arsenal fabricate barrel extensions in order to obtain the parts needed to complete the overhaul. This extra work increased the costs to about $10.4 million and the work was completed in December 2007.

In November 2006, Red River accepted an order totaling approximately $24.8 million to overhaul 200 M1114 up armor HMMWVs from the Army TACOM Life Cycle Management Command. The order was financed with fiscal year 2007 operation and maintenance appropriated funds and was modified twice. In January 2007, the order was reduced to overhaul 106 HMMWVs for about $13.1 million. Two months later in March 2007, the order was increased to 344 HMMWVs for about $56.1 million. In performing this work, the depot encountered two problems. First, the HMMWVs were not always available, resulting in changes to scheduling the performance of work. Second, the depot encountered problems in obtaining the material it needed to perform the repairs. For example, in May 2007, there was a shortage or potential parts shortage of 45 different parts to perform this work. To obtain the parts needed to perform the work, depot officials stated that they used parts from other vehicles at the depot or purchased parts via local procurement, including using government purchase cards. In August 2007, there was a shortage or potential parts shortage of 30 different parts. Since most of the work was not completed in fiscal year 2007, about $37.5 million carried over into fiscal year 2008. As of December 2007, documents showed that the depot anticipated completing work on this order in April 2008.

In discussing the M1114 up armor HMMWV work with Red River officials, they told us that the problems encountered in performing the fiscal year 2007 work also occurred in the previous fiscal year. First, the quantity to be repaired kept changing. Specifically, in January 2006 they accepted an order to repair 37 HMMWVs. In March 2006, the order was amended to 108 HMMWVs. Then in July 2006 the order was amended to repair 58 HMMWVs. Finally, in August, 2006, the order was amended back to 108 HMMWVs. Second, the depot also encountered problems on obtaining parts to perform the work. According to depot officials, because the last amendment increasing the order to 108 HMMWVs occurred in August 2006 and the HMMWVs to be repaired were in poor condition, the carryover amount was high.

Finally, someone who knows what the hell they're supposed to use their government credit card on!

As this problem gets worse, remember--every time a troop doesn't have the equipment that they need in a war zone, their unit suffers, their readiness suffers and they are placed in danger for no good reason.

And that's the real outrage here. No American should ever reach for a weapon or go without a vehicle that isn't there in a war zone.

Winning With Body Counts

It sounds like an impressive number, but boasting about how many insurgents you've killed isn't an ideal way to practice Counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics.

A U.S. Marines commander said Wednesday his troops have killed 400 insurgents in southern Afghanistan since late April.

Col. Peter Petronzio, the commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said the figure came from the governor of the southern Helmand province, where his troops have been deployed since late April.

Some 2,200 U.S. Marines moved into the town of Garmser in Helmand province to clean the area of insurgents.

Helmand province is the world's largest opium poppy growing region, the main ingredient in heroin. It is also the area with the highest level of insurgent activity in the country.

After months of fighting around Garmser, Petronzio said the area is not yet secure but is more stable.

"The Taliban proved they wanted to fight for Garmser and we took the fight to them," he told a news conference in Kabul.

Really, do we have to keep hearing about airstrikes, body counts and "last throes?"

...a body count tells you little, because you usually can’t know how many insurgents there were to start with, how many moved into the area, how many transferred from supporter to combatant status, or how many new fighters the conflict has created.

Wearing Out the Troops, Bush Administration Style

This is sickening to have to find out on the Thursday afternoon before a long holiday weekend--thanks for the News Dump, there, Pentagon Office of Public Affairs or whatever. These guys are NOT intended for long deployments and this is an ABUSE of the US Marine Corps.

The Pentagon has extended the tour of 2,200 Marines in Afghanistan, after insisting for months the unit would come home on time.

Marine Col. David Lapan confirmed Thursday that the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is doing combat operations in the volatile south, will stay an extra 30 days and come home in early November rather than October.

Military leaders as recently as Wednesday stressed the need for additional troops in Afghanistan. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has repeatedly praised the work of the 24th MEU in fighting Taliban militants in Helmand Province.

So, all of this talk about war with Iran--is it a pipe dream? Because there are no troops left. The cupboard is bare and we've exhausted our military.

When Bush leaves office, there won't be a single US combat division--Army, Marines, or Reserve/National Guard component--available for combat at 100% strength. That's the worst shape our military has been in since the start of the Korean War. Even during and after Vietnam, we had divisions sitting in Germany that were ready to fight. And in all of their infinite wisdom, they knew this was going to happen and they're deliberately leaving the next President without ANY military forces available to him. NONE.

It's a disgrace unparalleled in our history. A disgrace.

--WS

"The King of the Prison"

Another excellent piece from McClatchy on the al Qaeda detainees. Some of these stories are so basic in their explanations--as in, we got the wrong guys and if you don't torture them right, they'll die. Today's installment is about a senior Taliban member who defied the US. Do you think this story might explain why we're going to have a hell of a time convincing people that we know what we're doing?

Pakistani intelligence officers dragged him [Abdul Salam Zaeef] out of his house in Islamabad in late December 2001 or January 2002 and took him to Peshawar. "Your Excellency, you are no longer Your Excellency," he recalled one of them saying.

The Pakistanis handed him over to U.S. troops, who he said threw a sack over his head and pushed him into a helicopter. The Americans flew him to a warship, where he was held for about a week in a small cell that reminded him of a dog kennel, he said.

"I was afraid about what would happen to me," Zaeef said in an interview in Kabul, wearing slightly crooked gold-rimmed glasses and speaking in a near-whisper. "I didn't know if it was a dream or not. I never imagined this would happen to me."

Yet from mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Zaeef became a leader again. He helped orchestrate hunger strikes and exploit the missteps of a U.S. detention system that often captured the wrong men, mistreated them, then incarcerated them indefinitely without legal recourse.

The insurgency he helped launch in Guantanamo capitalized on the Americans' ignorance of Islamic customs and a pattern of interrupting prayers, shaving off prisoners' beards and searching their copies of the Quran.

I don't have any sympathy for this notion that we needed to be one hundred percent perfect in our handling of these men. While some were innocent, many more were actual terrorists who had either killed Americans or had been caught in the act of trying to kill Americans. What Democrats need to emphasize is that we are every bit as capable of fighting and defeating these elements as anyone else. We need to emphasize that we are not going to go into this fight without respecting the rule of law--to do so means we'll allow the enemy a huge propaganda victory.



Zaeef behaved somewhat like Frank Sinatra in Von Ryan's Express:

When he arrived at Guantanamo in the spring or summer of 2002, Zaeef was exhausted from the harsh treatment he'd received at Kandahar and Bagram.

He slept as often as he could and was just another detainee, Internment Serial Number 306. He got up when the guards came, and shuffled off in his orange prison clothes and flip-flops to answer questions about the Taliban leadership.

"He was very weak, physically, when I saw him at Guantanamo," said Mohammed Saduq, an Afghan who'd commanded Zaeef during the fight against the Soviets. "It is very difficult to know the inside of a man, and it's hard to say how it affected him — going from an ambassador to being in a cage — but he told me in Guantanamo that he was suffering badly."

The rules at Guantanamo, Zaeef said, reminded him of Bagram. The men weren't supposed to talk in their cells. They were supposed to say "please" and "sir" when they addressed the guards. In Guantanamo, however, the guards weren't beating the men, he said, and prisoners could speak up.

"After a month, we decided we could not accept these extremist measures. We must react," Zaeef said. "So we began shouting to each other. The soldiers came and asked if we were talking to each other. We said, 'Yes, we are not dogs.' We began throwing water at them, spitting at them; we said, 'If you want to kill us, fine.' "

A high-ranking officer came and spoke to the detainees, Zaeef said. The rules were rescinded. It was a victory in a game of inches.

Zaeef used his position as a leader of the detainees to push for Geneva Convention rights. What was our official response to this man? We let him go.

In June 2005, detainees at Guantanamo staged their biggest hunger strike yet: As many as 100 men refused to eat.

Prison authorities gathered detainee leaders and discussed their demands. Zaeef represented Afghans and Pakistanis, joining detainee representatives from several other nations.

After consulting with detainees in the cellblocks, Zaeef and the other leaders produced a list of demands that included Geneva Convention rights, court trials, less time in isolation cells, better treatment from the guards and so on.

However, the meetings among the detainees broke down before negotiations with U.S. authorities could proceed, Zaeef said, because the detainees worried that the Americans were eavesdropping to find out who their cellblock leaders were.

Zaeef was released that September.

Was this man dangerous? was he a threat to the United States? The problem I have with what's being done in our name is that we seem to be letting a lot of these people go. Should they have been detained in the first place?

McClatchy: We Got The Wrong Guys

We don't express, often enough, the enormous debt that we owe organizations like McClatchy--they do the heavy lifting of the actual reporting, we do the blogging, and they do excellent work. THIS series is Pulitzer worthy already--it details what we need to know about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a way that shows that the US is not fighting the war on terror in a way that would make us proud:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that [Mohammed] Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

Why did this happen? Well, for starters--poor leaders. Weak, ineffective leaders who did not know, chose not to respect, or ignored the rule of law meant we had people in the field doing things that reflect badly on them and on all of us. To date, many have been put on trial, but, really, that's just scapegoating. Like the old adage--if a ship runs aground, the Captain of the ship is relieved--then the policy should be that if troops under a general officer's command abuse detainees or prisoners, they should be relieved. If you make THAT the rule, every commander will sit up and pay attention--and respect the rules of war.

McClatchy's expanded coverage adds this to the mix:

The Defense Department has said that detainee abuse in places such as Bagram was the work of a handful of wayward soldiers. Even after Habibullah and Dilawar were beaten to death, U.S. military officials continued to say that such violence was isolated.

Cammack and other soldiers say the abuse was the outcome of sending troops, often reservists with no background in detainee operations, to installations where the rules were unclear and they received little support.

"It tore us down mentally really bad," said Cammack, who pleaded guilty to hitting Habibullah and received three months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge. "You had no support whatsoever ... everybody hit their boiling point."

Cammack was a specialist in the 377th Military Police Company, a reserve unit based in Cincinnati. Many of his buddies were small-town police officers or, like him, blue-collar laborers. He was one of four soldiers from the unit who agreed to interviews with McClatchy.

No one at Bagram, Cammack said, had any idea what he was doing. Senior officers who came through the Bagram Collection Point paid no attention to the privates and sergeants, who, Cammack said, were slowly losing control of themselves in the face of the war in Afghanistan.

I'm not going to fault Cammack for his perception--he was there, I was not. But I suspect that there are two issues here. One, if he, as a member of a Military Police unit, didn't know how to handle people in his custody, then he hasn't been trained properly. Military Police units should all be required to know how to handle detainees and prisoners in any and all events. If he and the members of his unit are predominantly police officers, then they know that there are rules for treating people in their custody. Those rules should have been defined and explained to them in Afghanistan--as in, hell yes, you can shoot someone if they're a threat to you, but no, you can't just beat the hell out of people because you don't like how fast they're eating. Second, it wasn't a "wayward soldier" issue. It was a leadership issue, and clearly, Cammack was made a scapegoat for failed leadership.

What the McClatchy series does is peel away the covers on how we handled these issues--the capturing, the detaining, and the processing of people suspected of being terrorists. If you want a clear cut example of what this process looked like in, for example, 2004, please see THIS .pdf file and note that a very clear-cut legal basis for capturing, holding, and putting these detainees on trial was attempted by the Bush Administration.

I say, "attempted" for obvious reasons--the legal basis for what they were doing was shaky, at best, and many of the sources were unreliable.

Mozzam Begg is in the McClatchy database of detainees, and his case is one found in that .pdf. You can see the government going back and forth--is he or isn't he?

McClatchy details his story here:

From childhood, Moazzam Begg relished tales of heroes, those who protect the very weak from the very strong. In his Jewish school, he heard them from his teachers. In his Muslim home, he heard them from his father. Later, on weekends, he heard them from an English lady-friend of his father.

The stories were about vastly different peoples: from ancient Jews to Arabian legends to more modern Britons. But to Begg the stories had several things in common: All were about people who stood up for what was right, no matter how strong the opponent. And all inspired him.

He never dreamed, however, that an arrest and three years of what he calls "torture light" in a superpower's prison would put him in a position to carry on their fight. Today, as he travels around the United Kingdom, speaking to university gatherings, politicians and civic groups, exposing what he describes as the inhuman nature of the U.S. Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison, he thinks that it has.

Begg was arrested on Jan. 31, 2002, at his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, while his wife and children slept nearby. During the next three years, U.S. authorities would accuse him of operating, funding and supporting al Qaida camps and operations. He maintains that while he'd supported Islamic causes in the past, including Kashmiri groups favoring secession from India in the mid-1990s, he'd never been involved in al Qaida or any movement that promoted violence against the West. In the 1990s, he'd traveled to Bosnia during its war and he'd attempted to travel to Chechnya during the conflict in that breakaway Muslim republic of Russia.

He says that what the U.S. claimed was an al Qaida camp he'd funded and was directing in Afghanistan was a girls school. The school in Kabul was an experiment under Taliban rule, which didn't allow co-education, to prove that girls could be well educated within a Muslim country. He says that he and his wife raised money for two years before heading to Afghanistan in 2001, and both taught there. His daughter even attended the school, he said.

He said they fled Afghanistan for Pakistan when the U.S. began bombing to oust the Taliban regime, and hoped to return to Afghanistan to reopen the school. He'd been in Islamabad for about three months when he was arrested.

Begg said that from the first moment of his arrest, he was convinced that the Americans had no idea whom they were seizing.

"When they put me in the vehicle, an American guard, who was trying very badly to look Pakistani, showed me a pair of handcuffs and told me, 'These were given to me by the wife of one of the September 11 victims. I promised her I'd use them to handcuff one of the men responsible.' He then put the handcuffs on me. All I could think was, 'Won't he feel stupid when he realizes I'm the wrong guy.' In the end, I don't think he cared. I was dark-skinned, that's all that mattered," Begg said.

And I go back to this issue--who the hell was that soldier and why didn't he have someone in his chain of command tell him to knock it off? He may very well have been given handcuffs and told to go get someone who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Well, did it ever occur to the guy to get the right person? Instead of just any person?

My position is this--we are going to make mistakes in a time of war. But if we maintain a solid foundation in the rule of law and make damned sure we have good leaders doing what they are supposed to be doing, we'll be able to do what we need to do--and that is kill the terrorists and protect this country--while still having a framework that allows us to criticize our conduct, evaluate what we do, and compensate anyone who is not treated fairly.

I am all for fighting the war on individuals who use "terrorism" as their chief tactic of achieving their goals. I am against being a dumbass about it. The smart way to fight terrorism is to spend a little bit of time and effort to find the Mohammed Akhtiars and the Moazzam Beggs and whoever else and ask them, pay them, and recruit them to fight on OUR side where possible. I'm funny that way--I see the world in a way that must make the neoconservatives giggle and fall down. I see the world as being many, many shades of gray, and if we are intelligent and surgical in the way we counter the ideology of the people against us by convincing the fence sitters and the somewhat apolitical people in their society to join us and help us if we promise not to abandon them (our track record there isn't so hot, I admit) then maybe--just maybe--we can counter the rise of the individuals who use radical Islam as their foundation for recruiting followers.

I would submit that we are in the position that we're in because the leadership at the top didn't pay attention to the important things. They paid attention to consolidating their power and demonizing their political enemies back home.

And we're suffering because of those choices.

For the record, no. I don't hate America. But thanks for asking. It makes me feel special.

Taliban takes Afghan villages, NATO plans counter-offensive

Hundreds of Taliban fighters seized several Afghan villages in southern Afghanistan today, prompting NATO and the Afghan forces to redeploy to counter the rebel forces. The villages that were taken over are in Arghandab district of Kandahar, the former stronghold of the fundamentalist Taliban forces.

Arghandab lies just north of Kandahar city -- the Taliban's former stronghold -- and a tribal leader from the region warned that the militants could use the cover from Arghandab's grape and pomegranate orchards to mount an attack on Kandahar itself.

''All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight,'' said Haji Ikramullah Khan. ''It's quite close to Kandahar. During the Russian war, the Russians didn't even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties.''

The push into Arghandab comes three days after a sophisticated Taliban attack on Kandahar's prison that freed hundreds of insurgent fighters being held there.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said NATO and Afghan military officials were redeploying troops to the region to ''meet any potential threats.''

''It's fair to say that the jailbreak has put a lot of people (militants) into circulation who weren't there before, and so obviously you're going to respond to that potential threat,'' he said.

Two powerful anti-Taliban leaders from Arghandab have died in the last year, weakening the region's defenses. Mullah Naqib, the district's former leader, died of a heart attack last year. Taliban fighters moved into Arghandab en masse last October, two weeks after his death, but left within days after hundreds of security forces were deployed there.

A second leader, police commander Abdul Hakim Jan, died in a massive suicide bombing in Kandahar in February that killed more than 100 people.

The Taliban offensive took place three days after a massive jailbreak that freed hundreds of prisoners, about half of them actual hardened militants.

Both the jailbreak and the Taliban offensive occurred in the wake of insurgent violence spiking upward by 50% in April and May.

Thank goodness we went to Iraq for aWol's vanity war so our forces are bogged down there and we can't mount an adequate response to this!

I swear to god, if the drooling dimwit had set out to do the damage he's managed, he couldn't have done a better job.

~~BG

“NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

The United States is running into resistance from Pakistan when it comes to securing the border between that country and Afghanistan.

“Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side,” said Owari Ghani, the governor of North-West Frontier Province, who is also President Pervez Musharraf’s representative in charge of the neighboring tribal areas.

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

“Pakistan is a sovereign state,” he said. “NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

The US and NATO regularly target Taliban forces on either side of the border:

On Wednesday night, the United States fired its fourth Predator missile strike since January, the most visible symbol of the American push for a freer hand to pursue militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban who use Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base to attack Afghanistan and plot terrorist attacks abroad. In Afghanistan, cross-border attacks have doubled over the same month last year and present an increasingly lethal challenge to American and NATO efforts to wind down the war and deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a sanctuary.

In an unusual step during a visit to Pakistan in March, Adm. Eric T. Olson, the commander of United States Special Operations Command, held a round-table discussion with a group of civilian Pakistani leaders to sound them out on the possibility of cross-border raids by American forces. He was told in no uncertain terms that from the Pakistani point of view it was a bad idea, said one of the participants.

Instead, Pakistani officials are trying to restore calm to their country, which was rattled by a record number of suicide attacks last year. Within days, they are expected to strike a peace accord with Pakistan’s own militants that makes no mention of stopping the infiltrations. In fact, Pakistani counterinsurgency operations have stopped during the new government’s negotiations with the militants.

[SNIP]

American officials in Washington said the Predator strike on Wednesday killed a handful of Qaeda militants, including one they described as a “significant leader.” The strike indicated that the C.I.A. retained some freedom to operate in the tribal areas. But as the gap between Pakistani and American policies widens, United States officials are pushing harder for still more latitude.

During his visit to North-West Frontier Province, Admiral Olson was taken to the military headquarters of the 14th Division of the Pakistani Army in Dera Ismail Khan, an area just outside the tribal region, where he was struck by the extent of the anti-Taliban sentiment, Pakistani officials said.

Still, in the talks, which were organized by the United States Consulate here in late March, the civilian leaders said they advised the Americans against fighting in Pakistani territory populated by Pashtuns. Pakistan’s government has long been wary of nationalist and separatist strains among the Pashtuns, whose population straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border.

“I said it would be extremely dangerous,” Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of North-West Frontier Province, said he told Admiral Olson. “It would increase the number of militants, it would be a war of liberation for the Pashtuns. They would say: ‘We are being slaughtered. Our enemy is the United States.’"

Map-languages and regions of Afghanistan

Within Pakistan, there are indications that the coalition government is coming apart:

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif pulled his party out of Pakistan's six-week-old coalition government on Monday, plunging the volatile Muslim nation back into political uncertainty.

Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) was the second-largest member of a four party alliance, made the announcement after failing to break a deadlock with its main coalition partner over the reinstatement of dismissed judges.

Sharif made the restoration of 60 judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf in November the main condition for joining the coalition led by the party of Asif Ali Zardari, the widower and political successor of the late Benazir Bhutto.

Three days of talks in London between Sharif and Zardari, whose Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leads the coalition, ended on Sunday without any breakthrough.

"Our ministers will meet the prime minister tomorrow and will submit their resignations," Sharif told a news conference.

Nine of the 24 ministers in Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's cabinet belong to the PML-N, including Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.

Sharif said his party would continue to support the PPP government despite quitting the cabinet.

"For the time being, we'll not sit in opposition."

Despite the possibility of the collapse of the Pakistani government, however, the New York Times says that the US is stepping up its rhetoric:

Last week John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, used perhaps the strongest language yet against Pakistan, saying that the United States found it “unacceptable” that extremists used the tribal areas to plan attacks against Afghanistan, the rest of the world and Pakistan itself.

“We will not be satisfied until the violent extremism emanating from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is brought under control,” Mr. Negroponte told the National Endowment for Democracy.

Earlier this month, Afrasiab Khattak and Asfandyar Wali Khan, the leaders of the Awami National Party, which leads the government in the North-West Frontier Province, met with Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Mr. Negroponte in Washington.

In their meetings, Mr. Khattak said, it was hard to deter the Americans from the notion of launching their own operations into Pakistan. The topic came up “again and again,” he said.

The Americans specifically mentioned their concern that Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas were preparing an attack on the United States, he said.

“We told them physical intervention into the tribal areas by the United States would be a blunder,” Mr. Khattak said. “It would create an atmosphere in which the terrorists would rally” popular support.

Should the United States and its NATO allies be focused on operations along the Pakistani border at all? According to researcher Sarah Meyer, the Afghan people are facing starvation and famine due to a particularly harsh winter, coupled with ongoing war in their country:

Among the resources compiled by Meyer, this article highlights the need to take care of the Afghan people:

If instead of the fields of poppies there were expanses of wheat, 18 million Afghans who today suffer from hunger would have enough food. With these statements - which appear a bit naive - the experts of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have declared that by better using international funds, the development of new irrigation and technology systems for agriculture could be realised. But the most difficult thing is convincing Afghan farmers to change their extensive opium cultivation to the production of wheat, fruit, and vegetables.

According to data supplied by the UN, Afghanistan uses 193,000 hectares of land for the cultivation of poppy, and produces more than 90% of the opium in circulation. The estimates reveal that by the end of 2008, the country will produce more than 8,200 tonnes of raw opium.

According to some experts, the world economic crisis and the dizzying rise in food prices everywhere could prompt farmers to convert their poppy fields to wheat. In fact, the price of wheat has risen from 157 dollars per tonne in January to 500 dollars in April of this year.

Tekeste Ghebray Tekie, the FAO representative in Afghanistan, is certain that by growing wheat with the appropriate irrigation systems, more than two and a half tons per hectare could be produced. "If you use this land for high cash crops like vegetables, fruit or cotton", Tekeste says, "then the contribution to food security will be enormous".

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan had much more irrigated land, but the irrigation systems were destroyed during the war. After the United States military intervention in the country, begun in October of 2001, 15 billion dollars in international aid was invested. But according to Oxfam, only 300 million of this has been earmarked for agriculture.

Photo: Dara, Afghanistan

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal highlights efforts by the US Department of Agriculture to assist Counterinsurgency Operations in Afghanistan:

Body armor is not in [Jeff] Knowles’ typical wardrobe as an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But then again, working with farmers in Afghanistan to help rebuild their agricultural system isn’t his typical work either.

Knowles, who now lives in Hawaii, spent six months in the war-scarred nation talking with farmers about what they grow and what their needs are. He was honored last week by USDA secretary Ed Schafer for his service in Afghanistan in 2005-06.

“I think it’s one of the best things we’re doing in the country,” Knowles said via a phone interview from his USDA office in Hawaii. “If we can help improve quality of life for farmers — and 95 percent of the Afghan people are farmers — we’re doing something real.”

Living conditions are rough. And most farmers are subsistence farmers, growing crops like wheat, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, apricots, apples and almonds.

But getting enough water for crops is a major issue …

It was in Hawaii that Knowles decided to volunteer for a six-month stint in Afghanistan.

“It was really intriguing to me — they were facing problems with erosion, heavy and widespread, and a lot of their irrigation system was destroyed,” he said. “It seemed that my entire career was pointing to this. The things I’d been working with for close to 30 years were the things they needed in Afghanistan.”

A Surge™ for Afghanistan?

In recent weeks the Pentagon has begun discussing adding up to 7,000 addition American Soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to make up for shortfalls from NATO allies as they begin to draw down forces or withdraw completely. If the options currently being discussed are carried out, it will raise the number of American service personnel to about 40,000 - higher than at any time in the six-and-a-half-year-old war.

The increasing proportion of United States troops, from about half to about two-thirds of the foreign troops in Afghanistan, would be likely to result in what one senior administration official described as “the re-Americanization” of the war.

“There are simply going to be more American forces than we’ve ever had there,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing future military planning.

A dozen NATO countries have pledged a total of about 2,000 troops, according to senior NATO officials, who provided the information on condition of anonymity according to standard diplomatic rules. Senior alliance commanders in Afghanistan have said they need about 10,000 more troops.

Only one country so far has actually begun preparing more troops to deploy: France, which is sending 700 to Afghanistan, NATO officials said.

Few of the additional troops are expected to arrive any time soon, the officials added.

Officials stressed that no formal new American deployment plans for Afghanistan had been presented to the Pentagon or the White House, and that the decision could be left to the next president, though they would not rule out the prospect that Mr. Bush would order a troop increase.

Mr. Bush has long faced criticism that the Iraq war distracted the country from confronting the Qaeda threat in Afghanistan, and Democrats as well as Republicans have expressed general support for shifting more attention to Afghanistan.

There are about 62,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, about 34,000 of them American, up from just 25,000 American troops in 2005. The American troops are divided into a force of 16,000 who operate under NATO command and 18,000 who conduct counterterrorism and other missions under American command outside the NATO structure, according to Pentagon statistics. The initial planning under way would send about two additional brigades of American forces, or about 7,000 troops, to Afghanistan next year. That would meet two-thirds of what commanders have portrayed in recent months as a shortfall of three brigades, or about 10,000 troops, including combat forces, trainers, intelligence officers and crews for added helicopters and troop carriers.

Initially, the Bush administration asserted that NATO ought to step into the breach and cover some American tail because the good ole U.S. of A is bogged down in Iraq - and publicly, the administration has applauded the efforts of the alliance. But...

The results of the NATO session disappointed commanders in Afghanistan. A NATO military spokesman issued a diplomatically worded statement this week. “In the run-up to and during the Bucharest meeting, nations added extra contributions,” the statement from Kabul said. “However, shortfalls still exist.”

Julianne Smith, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan policy institute, said the meeting did not live up to the expectations or the public celebration during the session.

“If you look at what the NATO commanders got, it’s hard to see the silver lining,” she said.

So Gates is looking at options to fill the void, and one of them is replacing the 3,200 Marines that were added in recent weeks under the understanding that the troop increase was temporary, when their rotation ends. He also said last month that the U.S. was preparing to increase troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009, but made no indication of degree. One unnamed official said that Gates made that statement after consulting with Bush, and impressing upon the empty-headed little nimrod that a public proclamation of commitment - putting your Marines where your mouth is - was necessary to retain the remaining support with out allies.

However, 7,000 is about all the forces the U.S. can muster - thanks to the fact that Iraq is eating resources and manpower at a phe-fucking-nomenal rate, and bin Laden laughing his skinny ass off from across the border while the Taliban regroups and gains strength and grows more effective.

Another reason to get the hell out of Iraq, fully fund the VA and the DoD health care systems, start rebuilding the Army and start the culling of the feckless from the herd where the senior officer corps is concerned. You want to know how to judge a senior officer? Provide his or her full, unvarnished bio - for instance, if you are reviewing Boylan you damned sure bring up that knife wound sustained off post in Korea, and you put that tall tale under the microscope - a million soldiers who have rotated though Korea would lose liquids through their nasal passages upon hearing that bullshit story that flies by civilians unchallenged - and then you stand that person in front of a group of current and former military personnel and give them the option of saluting, or turning their backs

If the feckless bastard sees shoulders, that's all you need to know.

Some of the things that made me rant today - Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008

The worst suicide bombing in the history of Afghanistan occurred in Kandahar on Sunday, leaving at least 80 dead and 90 wounded. The attack, blamed on Taliban forces, appeared to target a local tribal leader and police chief who had "declared war" on the them.

The target, along with five of his security detail were killed. The attack occurred at a dogfighting event just outside the city that had drawn entire families of Afghanis from all over Kandahar province. Dogfighting was previously banned when the Taliban ran the country because it involves gambling, an activity that was prohibited under their fundamentalist rule. “This is the action of the enemies of our country,” said the Governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khaled. “They do not let Afghans enjoy their lives and have a peaceful life.”


How's that Surge™ workin' out for ya? Ethnic Kurdish officials in Irbil are keeping their ethnic Arab residents on a short leash. Every three months, Arab residents have to report to an intelligence agency and bring their papers for proper vetting. So much for the blessings of liberty. I guess all Iraqis are equal, but in the new ethnically divided Iraq, some Iraqis are more equal than others, and how equal one is is determined by who is running things where you live. Great. Welcome to Johannesburg, circa 1978.

Hows that Surge™ workin' out for ya? II The fifth female suicide bomber so far this year blew herself up in an appliance market on Sunday, but this time there was no doubt that she was a willing participant. When wires were spotted under her clothing at a checkpoint she bolted toward the market. It is believed that she intended to target an Iraqi Colonel that was touring the area.

How's that Surge™ workin' out for ya? III - Remember what I told you last night about the 2000 coalition-allied and funded militia members who had abandoned their posts after an incident in which three Sons of Iraq civilian guard corps members were gunned down by American forces? Well, that was the second stand-down. Last night when I was posting, I forgot about this. Babil is the second province in which Sunni militiamen have ceased their cooperation with American forces. It happened in Diyala a week ago.

A military judge has overruled objections by the Government and will allow defense attorneys in the Hamdan case question Khalid Sheik Mohammed and six other alleged senior al Qaeda captives being held in seclusion at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Navy Capt. Keith Allred gave the U.S. government until Tuesday (Monday is a federal holiday) to establish an independent security arrangement to help lawyers representing Salim Hamdan gather evidence they say could exonerate their client. At issue is just how deeply involved the $200 per month driver with the third grade education was involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks. The prosecution maintains that Hamdan need not have belonged to the cells that plotted the attacks to have been part of the conspiracy to kill Americans, he is guilty by association. The defense argues that if Hamdan wasn't part of the plot, he should be found innocent of overarching conspiracy charges.

Hillary Clinton gave the most detailed response to questions posed about last weeks decision by the government to try six Guantánamo detainees in front of military tribunals, and to seek the death penalty for guilty verdicts. She would ask her Justice Department to transfer the detainees to either the civilian courts or regular military court system, instead of the current Kafkaesque "military commissions" that currently governs the fate of the detainees. The civlian court system handled the first World Trade Center attackers quite ably. They are in prison serving life, put there by a previous Clinton Justice Department.

[I haven't officially endorsed anyone since Richardson dropped out, but I will say this. I liked that answer.]

Reason number...hell, I've lost count why I eat a largely locally-grown diet, and sure as hell don't buy mass-produced ground anything. If it doesn't come from a steer we buy directly from a farmer or Four H member after the county fair season, or a deer we harvested; that we then have processed at a locker in a small town - we don't eat it. (Well, unless it's buffalo from McGonigles.) A meat-packing plant in southern California has been shut down, and a recall issued on 140 million pounds of beef, because the plant was processing "downer cows" that the USDA has deemed unfit for human consumption. It is believed that most of the meat has already been consumed, but hey, no worries! Most of it went to school lunch programs!

[Can we get a USDA inspector back in every meat processing plant please? Good grief.]

Researchers at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill have released a study that assesses human impact on the oceans and the results are chilling. The research was conducted by a team of researchers from the US, Canada and Great Britain. In all seventeen areas across which data was collected and analyzed,the human impact was obvious, and in many areas the threats to the oceanic ecosystems overlaps and the impact is compound. "The big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected," said lead scientist Ben Halpern at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Two days in a row, an organization of lawyers has made me swear I will continue my moratorium on attorney jokes. The National Association of Attorneys General has taken the position that the Earth is warming, the climate is changing, the ice caps are melting, and states attorney's general need to educate themselves about it. A vast majority of climate scientists believe that energy is the biggest contributor to global greenhouse gasses, and invariably, as the effects set in, the lawyers will be involved. As the attorneys that represent the citizens of their states, it stands to reason that state AG's should be able to adequately represent the citizens of their states when the torts hit the fan.

Goodnight all - consider this an open thread and I'll see you in the morning.

Insurgencies are becoming entrenched along Afghan-Pakistan border

Radical Islamic fundamentalist militants are bolstering their numbers and expanding their scope of influence in the forbidding terrain of the lawless tribal areas that flank the border on both sides.

From here, they traffic in disarray, violence and chaos over a vast area of both countries. This is the area that the remnants of al Qaeda fled to when they were allowed to escape at Tora Bora. Here they have found fertile soil and they have set about the business of regrouping, recruiting and resurging. The violence and bloodshed are spreading from the border areas to the Pakistani heartland and threatens to destabilize the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan - governments which have allied themselves with the United States and the western allies in those volatile countries.

From McClatchy:

In Afghanistan, U.S. and NATO forces are facing "a classic growing insurgency," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday.

But the U.S. military, stretched thin by the war in Iraq, is hard-pressed to send more than the 3,200 additional Marines the Bush administration is dispatching to Afghanistan. The growing insurgency there is fueling rifts within the NATO alliance as Germany and other nations refuse to allow their troops to participate in offensive operations in Afghanistan. The Afghan army is making progress but still cannot operate independently.

"Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," warned an Atlantic Council of the United States report last week. The report was directed by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, the former top NATO commander. "What is happening in Afghanistan and beyond its borders can have even greater strategic long-term consequences than the struggle in Iraq." (emphasis added)

The Pakistani army is ill-suited to confront a home-grown insurgency in the tribal areas - it is geared toward fighting a conventional land-war against India. To date the Pakistanis have avoided the George Bush modus operandi of "when the only tool you have is a hammer..." and avoided sending forces to battle the insurgency (using them to chase down al Qaeda has been volatile enough). The military leaders are reluctant to turn their guns on the insurgents because they fear that heavy casualties would prompt schisms within the military along ethnic and sectarian lines and that would destroy the Pakistani armed forces.

All the U.S. and the NATO allies can do is train a few Pakistani troops because U.S. military action would spark outrage among the populace, already on the verge of boiling over with anti-U.S. and anti-government fueled outrage.

But it gets better - the threat of terrorists trained and indoctrinated in the tribal areas directed at Afghan, Pakistani and even western targets is greater than it has ever been.

"The Taliban in Afghanistan now control more of the country than at any time since 2001, and their confederates in the tribal areas of Pakistan are expanding their operations almost day by day. While our attention has been diverted by Iraq, we've overlooked a potentially far more serious threat to the security of all Americans," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., told McClatchy.

There's no hard evidence of direct collusion between the Afghan Taliban and a new Pakistani Taliban alliance, both of which are made up mostly of Pashtun tribesmen, who dominate the region of soaring mountains and rugged deserts that span the frontier. Indeed, the Afghan Taliban deny links with the Pakistani insurgents.

But the ties among the Pashtuns are personal, historic, ethnic and ideological, and experts worry that the region faces a growing jihadi movement that's aided by al Qaida with Arab and Central Asian fighters, coordination, money and motivation.

"You see some indication that there is a blurring of the lines and some associations that are not helpful," said a senior U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Husain Haqqani, a political scientist and former aide to the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said that the group "have become a seamless whole." The common thread that unites them all is that the groups calling themselves "Taliban" on either side of the border are descended from the Mujahadeen, the Islamic guerrillas that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979-89. Back then, they were the standard-bearers for the west and they battled the Soviets with arms that were supplied by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Britain and flowed through Pakistan.

One point enjoys widespread support: The Bush administration bears much of the blame for the current FUBAR security situation in the least stable nuclear nation on earth.

First, in Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan was left to twist in the wind after the focus changed and left that poor, beleaguered nation unsecured after the 2001 invasion. Then the Bush administration turned the screws on Pervez Musharraf to send troops into the tribal areas to hunt down al Qaeda operatives who had escaped there from Tora Bora. The presence of these troops outraged the tribes, and cemented opposition with heavy-handed tactics and high civilian casualties. While this was going on, little heed was paid to the Taliban, and their support among a pissed-off populace took root. Growth in support exploded after Musharraf ordered a strike against The Red Mosque last summer. That raid killed scores of people.

The Taliban Movement of Pakistan, which was only established in December of 2007, has already extended it's reach into all seven tribal agencies, as well as the North West Frontier Province.

Taliban-sponsored violence has shaken the provincial capital Peshawar to it's very foundation. It has killed hundreds of security forces personnel. Ammunition deliveries have been hijacked, major thoroughfares have been seized, and for the first time ever, a major city has been cut off from the rest of the country by militants.

Across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban has expanded the territory under their control and now moves around freely in spite of heavy combat losses last year with NATO troops. "The number of districts in which the Taliban operate exploded last year," said John McCreary, a former senior intelligence analyst with the Joint Chiefs of Staff who's now with the private contractor dNovus RDI. "This is the first year they have managed to sustain over 100 attacks per month for the whole year since they started to climb back. One hundred attacks per month used to be surge figure. Now it's the new norm."

Alienating our Allies

It isn't like we have a whole lot of them left, so Bob Gates slur against our NATO allies in Afghanistan is not only troubling, it is, frankly, stupid. Which also troubles me - Gates is not a stupid fellow. I have never been a fan, but at least I grudgingly respected his competence and talent - but then he said this:

“I’m worried we’re deploying [military advisers] that are not properly trained, and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counter-insurgency operations.”

Now I can make with the scorn and ridicule without a second thought.

In case you missed it, Gates blasted the Brits and other NATO member states fighting in Afghanistan by saying in an interview that the allies lack of experience in counter-insurgency warfare was contributing to the escalating violence and instability in the south of that beleaguered nation, and contributing to the rise of the Taliban. (Perhaps he has forgotten that the Brits are the only country to actually win a counterinsurgency? Malaysia in the 50's, anyone?)

His remarks drew sharp criticism and instant reactions from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, the three countries that have born the brunt in the south. The Dutch were particularly incensed.

The Dutch were so angry at what appeared to be direct criticism that they summoned the US Ambassador in The Hague to explain Mr Gates’s comments. British and Dutch officials refused to believe that the criticism was directed at them, but Eric Adelman, the US Assistant Secretary of Defence, nonetheless had to ring around Nato capitals to give reassurance that Mr Gates was not attacking any individual member.

[snip]

As officials tried to smooth over the apparent rift, his comments drew a fierce response. Patrick Mercer, a Conservative MP and a former British Army officer, said they were “bloody outrageous”. He said: “I would beg the Americans to understand that we are their closest allies, and our men are bleeding and dying in large numbers.”

Britain has 7,800 troops in southern Afghanistan, where 81 have been killed. The Dutch and the Canadians have also lost a substantial number of soldiers in counter-insurgency operations against the Taleban.

So what's the deal here? Remember that Gates, at his very core, is an ideologue. Is he making such unhinged and offensive comments now because he knows that a year from now there will be a Democratic President with Democratic majorities in both houses? Is he undermining relations now in advance of that eventuality because he wants to make it as difficult as it can possibly be for the next president?

Petulant fuck.

Diplomats Expelled from Afghanistan

A diplomatic set-to is brewing in Afghanistan in the wake of a Briton and an Irishman being declared "Persona Non Grata" and ordered to leave the country by Thursday. The men, who work for the European Union and the United Nations stand accused of threatening state security by meeting with Taliban insurgents. Both men have worked in Afghanistan for over a decade, even when the Taliban was in charge in the country. Both are well versed in local languages and customs.

The Afghan government accused the men of meeting with members of the Taliban in the southern province of Helmand, where the Taliban insurgency has a stronghold. Helmand province where the majority of the opium poppies are grown and harvested. "Not only did they hold talks with the Taliban, but also had given them money," the Afghan official said. "It is not clear whether they were supporting the insurgency or not."

It is unclear at present whether the meeting was a personal undertaking, or whether they were acting in an official capacity. Approximately 50 Afghans, some of whom are colleagues of the men, have been detained for questioning and investigations over their links to the matter.

Western diplomats sprang to the defense of the two men, insisting that it was all a misunderstanding, and that they hoped the men would be allowed to return quickly. They insist that the men were likely meeting with tribal leaders, and didn't set out to negotiate with the taliban. The skill set the men possess are vital to the success of the multiple programs and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are struggling to run reconstruction and development projects.

The greatest threat to humanitarian progress in Afghanistan is the strengthening Taliban insurgency, particularly in the southern and eastern portions of the country where the remnants of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network sow distention and stoke the fires of insurgency.

The unnamed Afghan official that spoke to Reuters said that the meeting in question took place in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province. Musa Qala is the region that sparked controversy earlier in the year when British forces withdrew after a deal was brokered with tribal elders to police themselves. That agreement was blasted by the Afghan government after Taliban insurgents promptly took over control of the region and held it until they were driven out two weeks ago by NATO and Afghan forces.

The Afghan government has little popular support in the Taliban strongholds, and insists publicly that it does not negotiate with insurgents, but unofficially it is commonplace for frequent contacts to take place. Likewise, western governments and diplomats hold a similar public line, while privately arguing that dividing the insurgency and splitting the leadership is a legitimate strategy to be pursued.