The War in Afghanistan and Northwest pakistan can be won

America's real fight in Afghanistan is against al Qaeda fighters and the leaders who direct and supply them. Al Qaeda is allied with and supporting the Taliban attempt to retake control of Afghanistan. This is a movement largely motivated by an extreme fundamentalist version of Islam, which provides the basis for the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda. The alliance allows al Qaeda to conduct its worldwide mission, while the Taliban protect them and use al Qaeda expertise and resources to retake control of Afghanistan.

The U.S. and NATO forces are succeeding in driving the leadership out of Afghanistan. So they are taking refuge in Northwest Pakistan. This has led the Taliban to try to strengthen their control of territory in Pakistan. This puts the Pakistani nuclear weapons in danger of being taken over by radicals who are likely to either use them or sell them to terrorists.

The Pakistan Army has redirected some of its resources^* away from Pakistan's border with India and gone after the Taliban in the Swat valley in the Northwest region. They appear to be having some success against the Taliban. The New York Times reported yesterday:

American officials say they are seeing the first evidence that dozens of fighters with Al Qaeda, and a small handful of the terrorist group’s leaders, are moving to Somalia and Yemen from their principal haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In communications that are being watched carefully at the Pentagon, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency, the terrorist groups in all three locations are now communicating more frequently, and apparently trying to coordinate their actions, the officials said.

Of course, this will increase the need to create more effective governments in Yemen and especially in Somalia. In the age of terrorism^**, such failed states cannot be allowed to become refuges for the bandit and insurgent groups who operate using assymetric war against the rest of the world. With the stronger motivation of those nations possibly being too weak to remove them then perhaps those weak nations will be able to get the assistance they need to become more modern and effective states. All of that is going to be required to win the war against terrorist tactics and the insurgents who use them. But with greater success in Pakistan, we (meaning the modern industrialized nations of the world) may be getting there.

Now the Pakistani pressure on the Northwest Pakistan refuges together with the targeted predator strikes on the insurgent leadership based there is forcing them to look to move elsewhere. So some al Qaeda leaders and fighters are leaving Pakistan and moving to Somalia and Yemen.

The solutions will result from the effects of many nations all using diplomacy, trade policies and limited military actions. The quite rapid progress in the Afghanistan/Pakistan theater clearly demonstrate the greater effectiveness of the Obama administration methods over the go-in-alone military-oriented methods of the Bush administration.

[A note: "NATO extends anti-piracy mission off Somalia". This is, of course, related to the battle against al Qaeda and its Taliban ally.]

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^* This raises a number of questions. The Pakistani government is quite weak, having only limited control over the Army. The Army itself still sees the great threat against Pakistan to by India. The biggest symbol of the conflict between those two nations remains the Kashmir conflict, so the Pakistani Army is loath to take any resources away from focus on India and Kashmir. In fact, the Pakistani Army assisted the growth and combat by the Taliban as a way to maintain control of the Pakistani border away from India.

A major reason for the Terror attack on Mumbai, India by terrorists from Pakistan is surely intended to cause the Indians to increase military pressure on Pakistan.

So has the incursion of the Taliban into Pakistan proper convinced the Pakistani Army to take resources away from defense from India to deal with the more immediate threat to Pakistan? Has there been effective diplomacy between Pakistan and India to give the Pakistanis the belief of a reduced threat from the Indian borders? One hopes the U.S. has brokered such diplomacy, since an American guarantee of Indian promises adds credibility to the Indian promises. British guarantees are probably very effective there also.

As I say, there are a lot of questions raised by the Pakistani attack into the Swat Valley.

^** John A. Nagle in his excellent book on counter-insurgency Learning to eat soup with a knife points out that the growth of insurgency and terrorist tactics since WW II is not surprising. It results from the loss of Imperial control over much of the world along with the wide spreading of cheap and effective small arms and bomb technology and supplies. The tactics have grown as communications technology has developed. The result is that the problems that are resulting in terrorism have to be dealt with as civil-military political problems with the primary focus on political solutions rather than on military ones. Neither the American culture nor its military deal well with this kind of problem. In spite of long experience with irregular warfare, the military has never easily adapted to this environment.

Bush admin wastes spends money to protect YOU!

The Bush administration is doing everything - spending anything - just to protect Americans from terrorists and the Taliban, right?

No, not really, what they are doing is shovelling money out the door and not looking at where it goes or what it does. Just hand the Pakistan military the money and they''ll go after the Taliban and the terrorists in Northwest Pakistan. No need to put controls on who gets the money and how it is used - the Pakistan military is reliable just like the American military, right? Hey, it worked in Iraq! All those pallets of cash bought - I wonder where that money actually went? Probably graft to contractors and administrators. But that's what Republicans do best, isn't it? Corruption and sharing the graft?

Apparently it never occurred to the Bush administrators that the Pakistan military was the key supporter and organizer for the Taliban in the first place. Instead of helping the Pakistan military to build up and go after the Taliban and the terrorists, the money is being diverted to graft, corruption, and building up the Pakistan military to combat the Indian army. From the New York Times:

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. [Snip]

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

“I personally believe there is exaggeration and inflation,” said a senior American military official who has reviewed the program, referring to Pakistani requests for reimbursement. “Then, I point back to the United States and say we didn’t have to give them money this way.”

Pakistani officials say they are incensed at what they see as American ingratitude for Pakistani counterterrorism efforts that have left about 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers dead. They deny that any overcharging has occurred.

The $5 billion was provided through a program known as Coalition Support Funds, which reimburses Pakistan for conducting military operations to fight terrorism. Under a separate program, Pakistan receives $300 million per year in traditional American military financing that pays for equipment and training.

Civilian opponents of President Pervez Musharraf say he used the reimbursements to prop up his government. One European diplomat in Islamabad said the United States should have been more cautious with its aid.

“I wonder if the Americans have not been taken for a ride,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. [Snip]

Early last week, six years after President Bush first began pouring billions of dollars into Pakistan’s military after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon completed a review that produced a classified plan to help the Pakistani military build an effective counterinsurgency force.

The plan, which now goes to the United States Embassy in Islamabad to carry out, seeks to focus American military aid toward specific equipment and training for Pakistani forces operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where Qaeda leaders and local militants hold sway.

For their part, Pakistani officials angrily accused the United States of refusing to sell Pakistan the advanced helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft, radios and night-vision equipment it needs.

What's the surprise? Where you find Republicans in government you find corruption and incompetence. Why should anyone be surprised to find more of it in shovelling money out to the Pakistani military? And what would you expect their partners in crime in Pakistan to tell the Press when called? "Oh, yeah. THAT money. No, No, it was spent properly and we resent the implications that there is gambling going on here -- no,wait. That was in the Movie Casablanca, wasn't it?"

Al Qaeda is not al Qaeda in Iraq - Bush wants them confused

James Wimberly reports on the way the testimony from Petreaus and Crocker dropped the phrase "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) in favor of the less accurate "al Qaeda."

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is an organization created in Northern Iraq by the Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The organization was originally named Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Group of Monotheism and the Holy Struggle). There has never been a close association between AQI and al Qaeda. AQI has no record of attempting to attack Americans in America and no known capability or motivation to do so.

Confusing the two groups serves only to justify the lies used to drag America into the unnecessary war in Iraq. It is a Republican ploy to attempt to avoid responsibility for the greatest single foreign policy blunder ever made by an American President.

So what? Here's what, from TPM:

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents have accounted for most of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq. There likely has been some reduction in Sunni insurgent violence against U.S. troops in Anbar this year, and in fact the U.S. strategy of joining with the Anbar Sunnis against al Qaeda in Iraq is probably part of the reason Petraeus is downplayng the Sunni insurgency at the moment.

But whatever the short-term exigency, this has been a conflict marked by our inability, unwillingness, or idealogical aversion toward accurately identifying our enemies. Even the use of the blanket term "enemy" is misleading in a conflict with multiple competing interests, where alliances come and go, and in which the enemy of thy enemy is not necessarily thy friend. [Snip}

...the strategic and tactical miscalculations arising from the misidentification, to put it charitably, of the competing groups there crippled whatever chance there was of the U.S. effort succeeding.

An strong argument can be made that the confusion of various enemy groups and conflation of them into al Qaeda is (and has been) a propaganda tool used by the Bush administration to fool the American public into believing that there was a legitimate 9/11-related reason for invading Iraq in the first place and then for convincing the American public to keep troops in Iraq when the mismanagement of the occupation by Jerry Bremer and the CPA allowed the insurgency to develop. But there is more.

This administration is filled with decision-makers who believe their own propaganda, chief among them being Bush himself.

Don Rumsfeld felt that the American military was the most powerful in the world because it could deliver combat power anywhere in the world and take out targets almost anywhere. Unfortunately, combat power does not win a counter-insurgency. In fact, the inappropriate use of that combat power has the effect of alienating the population who has to be convinced to oppose the insurgents. That means that a counter-insurgency is at its base dependent on large quantities of accurate and honest Intelligence.

When the decision-makers doesn't understand the nature of the war they are fighting and depend on what their own propaganda says to make decisions in the war, then the insurgents can be expected to win.

That's why it is critically important to distinguish between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. The Bush administration has shown repeatedly that it cannot make those fine distinctions. That is why Petreaus and Crocker were on Capital hill the last two days trying to dress up conflicting statistics to show that there is "Light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq. But it's a road show selling a charade.

With someone else as President besides Bush and with Dick Cheney absent, the occupation of Iraq might possibly have muddled through to a result that would not be so starkly a total failure as the occupation of Iraq has shown itself to be. We'll never know. With them there, there is no possibility of anything that can even be papered over to resemble success.

Terrorism: massive existential threat or just a few very nasty bandits?

Can we trust the conservatives to be honest about how many terrorists are out there and how effective they are? Or are they in business to exaggerate those numbers to maintain political power here in the U.S.?

Consider. The Republican Party needs a massive threat to America so that they can be elected to defend this nation. 1989 was the second worst year of the twentieth century for them (after 1929.) When the USSR collapsed and Communism disappeared, the reason for electing Republicans disappeared with the Communists.

In 1997 the (NeoConservative) Project for the New American Century showed the searching for a new reason for conservatives to run for election in their complaint that "American foreign and defense policy is adrift." Twelve years after the collapse of Communism they were saved by Osama bin Laden's attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Suddenly Middle Eastern terrorists became the new threat to the existence of America and the American Way of Life (as defined by Republicans.)

The Bush administration was already even in 2001 recognized as somewhere between marginal and failing. They had canceled the ABM Treaty, established the Anti-Ballistic Missile System and gotten their tax cut, and the disinterested Bush who was their leader decided to take the month of August off. They had nothing left to do. September 11 changed that, permitting Bush - Cheney to ram through the long-desired dream of the NeoConservatives, a military attack on Iraq.

The attack would be quick, American troops in and out in a few months, and the grand principles of the free market with minimal government interference would create a highly productive free market democracy that would be a beacon to all the Middle East, inviting them to join in the great conservative revolution that was going to sweep the world.

Didn't work, of course.

After the conservatives under Paul Bremer dismantled the government, military and police forces of the autocratic state-economic system that controlled Iraq, there was nothing left to build on. Since anyone who had been part of the previous government (and remember - that includes the economy) had the "Wrong Attitudes" for a free market small government society, such previous government members were not allowed to participate in the new Iraq that the American conservatives were creating.

American conservatives consider a person's belief in conservatism to be more important as a job qualification than demonstrated knowledge and experience on the job. So in America we got Michael Brown, a good conservative known by another high-ranking conservative to be head of FEMA. The staffing policies of conservatives destroyed FEMA and they destroyed Iraq.

Is it any surprise that the unemployed and unpaid previous members of the government and military of Iraq would try to force the American troops out of their nation? And if someone is going to force the most powerful military force in the world out of a nation they have invaded, then the only way to do it is asymmetric Warfare. Asymmetric warfare is another term for what the news media call "Terrorism."

The short story is that the U.S. created the Iraqi Insurgency by both invading Iraq and by the mismanagement of the occupation under Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and NeoCon members of the American Enterprise Institute.

An insurgency needs support from outside the nation it is operating in, so the Iraqi Insurgents were not going to turn down training, equipment and foreign fighters offered by another enemy of America, al Qaeda. The question is, has al Qaeda taken over the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq?

They certainly have not taken control of the Shiite Insurgents. One tactic the al Qaeda members have used is to bomb Shiite mosques to try to get the Shiites to attack Sunnis, because this would make the Sunni Insurgents more dependent on al Qaeda as well as jack up the overall level of violence in Iraq.

This has led both Shiites and Sunnis to attack American forced to try to get them to withdraw from Iraq. The Bush administration, however, has defined leaving Iraq as "Losing Iraq" and as being defeated by al Qaeda. To support this they offer what appear to be highly inflated numbers of the number of al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq. It is only by inflating the numbers of actual al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq that the Bush administration is able to justify keeping U.S. troops there in a nation where we are attacked daily and where we have no real objective to fight for except to just keep our troops there in the Middle East!

Washington Monthly has just published an article by Andrew Tilghman entitled The Myth of AQI . [AQI is al Qaeda in Iraq, which is not the same as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Using the same name allows AQI to seem larger and more fearful than they really are.] Here is Tilghman's story on the numbers of al Qaeda fighters that actually exist in Iraq:

What if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated. [Snip]

In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq....Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view....spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent....But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement. [Snip]

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization." [Snip]

The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate?
[Also quoted in Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog]

It is rather clear that the Bush administration is lying about the size of the actual al Qaeda force operating in Iraq. But they have to, since otherwise it becomes clear that the major cause of the insurgency in Iraq is the presence of American occupying troops.

The Shiites (20% of the population) and the Sunnis (60% of the population) almost entirely want the U.S. troops out of Iraq. The Kurds (20% of the population), who are not involved in the insurgency - counter-insurgency fighting that is tearing Iraq up would rather we did not leave, as we are their protection from the rest of the Iraqi's, Iran and Turkey.

But if AQI is actually only about 850 full-time fighters, and we have 160,000 troops and nearly as many contractors tied down in Iraq just to deal with them, then the Taliban and the al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan and Afghanistan are getting a free ride from us. The Bush administration is fighting the insurgency they created in Iraq themselves and letting the rest of the terrorists in the world go merrily along their way with no interference.

This is just more Bush administration - conservative Republican incompetence at work, concealed by more lies. Lies and incompetence are the hallmarks of the Bush administration. And every time it looks like they are hitting rock bottom, they find new ways to go even deeper to new levels of incompetence covered by lies.

This administration has to go. Soon.

Bush lost Afghanistan because he is simple-minded

When al Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept 11, 2001 everyone knew where they came from. Afghanistan. Bin Laden had been working with the Taliban to control that country and use it as a base so that al Qaeda could use it to train and send out terrorists to disrupt the moderate Islamic and secular governments he wanted to replace. Since they were remaining in power largely by support from the U.S., al Qaeda also went after the U.S.

Pakistani scholar Ahmed Rashid, who has spent thirty years studying the connections between the Pakistani military and religious extremist groups points out in Newsweek that the Afghans hate the Taliban.

The mountains and valleys surrounding Afghanistan are among the least understood parts of the globe, he says. And he believes his findings help policymakers understand and alleviate tensions in the volatile region. He's shared his research with the world and has had high hopes, particularly for successive U.S. administrations. In recent years that hope has been dashed.

Until Bush came into office, Ahmed thought his words mattered to America. In the 1980s, he discussed Taliban resistance with ambassadors over tea. In the 1990s, he collaborated with policymakers to raise Afghanistan's profile in the Clinton White House. But during the Bush administration, he feels his risky research has been for naught.

The administration has "actively rejected expertise and embraced ignorance," Ahmed told me inside his fortress. Soon after the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001, Ahmed visited Washington DC's policy elite as “the flavor of the month.” His bestseller Taliban had come out just the year before. The State Department, USAID, the National Security Council and the White House all asked him to present lectures on how to stabilize post-war Afghanistan.

Ahmed traversed the city’s bureaucracies and think tanks repeating “one common sense line”: In Afghanistan you have a “population on its knees, with nothing there, absolutely livid with the Taliban and the Arabs of Al Qaeda . . . willing to take anything.” The U.S. could "rebuild Afghanistan very quickly, very cheaply and make it a showcase in the Muslim world that says ‘Look U.S. intervention is not all about killing and bombing; it’s also about rebuilding and reconstruction…about American goodness and largesse.”

What did Bush and Cheney do? Same thing they did to New Orleans. They took their eyes off the ball and tried to solve a minor problem in Iraq by using military force. Bush and Cheney attack people. They don't do nation-building or city-building.

The only tool the Bush administration recognizes is military power. Instead of using aid to rebuild Afghanistan they are trying to dominate it militarily.

America has done the same thing to Pakistan, says Ahmed. After 9/11, the current administration embraced Musharraf’s military regime unquestioningly because it waved a big stick and assured Bush it would smash terrorists with it. America took Musharraf at his word. Meanwhile the dictator "pursued a dual strategy," hoarding U.S. funds while letting pockets of extremism grow.

For years Ahmed has been accusing Musharraf of deceit and calling for America to pressure him to democratize. Now, Ahmed says, America’s vocal, singular focus on terrorism makes it "virtually impossible to convince average Pakistanis that the war against extremism is not just America’s war, it is theirs too.” This lack of local buy-in exacerbates the threat of transnational terror.

Bush never understood foreign policy. He failed to prepare for a terrorist attack on America because he could not conceive of it, and Cheney did not think that terrorism was possible unless it was state-supported. They both thought the Clinton administration people were ignorant and deluded when they briefed the incoming Bush administration that the greatest threat to America during the early 21st Century was going to be terrorism organized by non-state organizations.

That's why they considered the two most important foreign policy issues to be military containment of China and the anti-ballistic missile system. Because the guys at the top did not consider terrorism to be important, the managers of the agencies that had information on terrorists and terrorism (FBI and CIA that we know of) did not consider it important to investigate foreign Muslim aviation students who only wanted to know how to fly a jet but did not consider it important to learn to land or take off. Not did the FBI consider it important to follow up when the CIA informed them that known al Qaeda terrorists had traveled from Thailand to California.

September 11 was a real wake up call to the Bush administration, but one they were not ready for. Their reaction was to increase their secrecy so that no one would realize just how badly they had screwed up and to develop a public relations response to al Qaeda. The PR response was (and still is) encapsulated in the slogan "the Global War on Terror."

War, of course, means troops and bombs, not civilian foreign aid or diplomacy. The Bush administration does not DO civilian foreign aid or diplomacy. They do war and they do pubic relations.

War still means troops. Cheney and the NeoCons do not trust anything short of killing their enemies or holding a gun on them until they are imprisoned. They don't trust any enemy to hold to an agreement, especially in the Middle East. On the PR side they are aware that the word "democracy" is something that a lot of people profess to believe in, and democracy means voting. So they offer people the option between war and elections, and assuming that elections means democracy, they will hold off bombing those people. They believe in bribery or war.

They have been horribly shocked that instead of taking bribes those ungrateful Muslims will fight an insurgency. I am sure that the Bush reaction is that you just can't trust people like that.

The people in the Middle East have a very realistic view of the Bush administration. The Bushies will demand obedience or they will attack your town and kill everyone who moves. Those troops don't care what the townspeople want or need. They just demand obedience or the troops and bombs will be sent in. Then the troops and bombs arrive, the killing will be indiscriminate, since the American soldiers don't speak the language or respect the culture.

Bush and the Bushies consider the terrorists to have a single purpose - to destroy America. They know this and don't care why it is true. Without any knowledge of the causes of the terrorism, they don't trust the terrorists.

Since the Bushies think in sound bytes, the only reason they can imagine for such a hatred of America is that the terrorists are Muslims. Without being able to make a clear distinction between "terrorist" and "Muslim" they assume that all Muslims are terrorists. [This same inability to distinguish between two groups without a clear boundary between them leads to the fallacy many conservatives make when they assume that a human being is human from the moment of conception, and thus assume that abortion is murder. It is a symptom of minds which cannot deal with logical and linguistic complexities and demand that leaders provide certainties.]

Since the Bushies cannot understand the terrorists, they do not trust them. The only way to deal with someone you cannot trust who might threaten you is to use force.

The experts offer complex explanations for why the terrorists are behaving the way they do, but the Bushies cannot understand or trust the complex explanations, so they don't trust the experts, either.

So instead of going into Afghanistan after September 11 and removing the Taliban and al Qaeda, then working to create a nation that would reject such extremism, the Bushies bought into the NeoCon sound byte that they needed to create an Iraqi showcase and let the magic of the free market cause all the Middle Eastern nations to emulate the new Iraq.

Rebuilding Afghanistan would be a complex program. The NeoCons and Ahmed Chalabi offered a simplistic solution that depended on the magic of the free market rather than trust in all those fancy experts.

Simple-minded people act on simple slogans rather than on complex and difficult to understand analysis. Rebuilding Afghanistan was going to be a complex proposition. Attacking Iraq was a lot easier.

So now we are bogged down in an Iraq too complex to understand, Afghanistan is being taken over again by the Taliban and has become the number one producer of Heroin in the world, and the unqualified American support of Pakistan's President Musharraf and his military is threatening to turn Pakistan (a nuclear power) over to the fundamentalist extremists.

In the meantime, Bush remains simple-minded, operating as though sound bytes intended for political public relations campaigns were actually governing policies and Darth Cheney continues to distrust everyone and depend on military force as the solution to all problems foreign and domestic. The only trust that exists is between Bush and Cheney. Cheney trusts that Bush will remain simple-minded and under his control, and Bush trusts Cheney to fix the messes that are too complex for Bush to begin to understand.

The rest of us get to watch the rapid decline of our once-great nation on all fronts as these fools keep trying to solve complex problems with nothing but simplistic slogans-for-policies or military power.

Bush to defeat Jihadists by making them stronger

As I listened to the Diane Rhem Show this morning Dr. Phebe Marr, author of "A Modern History of Iraq" and an expert contributor to the report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, James Kitfield, senior correspondent, "National Journal" magazine and Col. Gary Anderson, U.S. Marine Corps--Retired all strongly made the point about how difficult it will be to withdraw from Iraq. Col Anderson's point that as we withdraw we continually have fewer troops available in country with which to protect our troops. (Force Protection.)

Essentially, getting out will be a lot harder than getting our troops into Iraq was. But just because it will be very hard to get out does not itself justify staying there and fighting.

Every strategy for success in Iraq depends on the government of Iraq taking control of that country and making it work again at least as well as it did under Saddam before we invaded. All of the Washington-designed benchmarks that were not met involved the failure of the government to achieve any success at all, and there is no indication that they will suddenly turn that around. Instead they have decided to take the month of August off and not bother trying.

Add to that the fact that our military presence can do nothing to make their government effective.

Michael Abramowitz reports today on what the National Intelligence Estimate which was released yesterday tells us. It's not good.

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary. [Snip]

Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there. [Snip]

But many Democrats questioned the administration's explanations, seizing on the key judgments of the new intelligence estimate as yet another reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and changing the administration's mission of the past four years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the current situation in Iraq "has helped to energize" al-Qaeda. "Changing our strategy in Iraq and narrowing our military mission to countering al-Qaeda terrorism -- as a bipartisan majority in the Senate now favors -- would be the single greatest thing we could do to undermine al-Qaeda's ability to use Iraq as a recruiting and propaganda tool fueling the growth of regional terrorist groups," he said in a statement.

Al-Qaeda's participation in the Iraqi violence has figured particularly heavily in recent administration arguments for a continued U.S. troop presence there, because White House strategists regard it as a politically salable reason for staying and continuing to fight.

Some terrorism analysts say Bush has used inflated rhetoric to depict al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the same group of extremists that attacked the United States on Sept. 11 -- noting that the group did not exist until after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These analysts say Bush also has overlooked the contribution that U.S. actions have made to the growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been described as kind of a franchise of the main al-Qaeda network headed by bin Laden.

Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who has been involved in previous intelligence estimates, said that the administration has correctly identified the danger posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there are indeed links between the Iraq group and the larger international terrorist network. But he said the White House is drawing the wrong conclusion, and argued instead that it is the U.S. presence in Iraq that is fueling the terrorists' cause.

"Iraq matters because it has become a cause celebre and because groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central exploit the image of the United States being out to occupy Muslim lands," Pillar said.

Referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Clinton administration official Daniel S. Benjamin, who has written books and articles on international terrorism, said: "These are bad guys. These are jihadists." He added: "That doesn't mean we [should] stay in Iraq the way we have been, because we are not making the situation any better. We're creating terrorists in Iraq, we are creating terrorists outside of Iraq who are inspired by what's going on in Iraq. . . . The longer we stay, the more terrorists we create."

So what the Intelligence experts are pointing out is that we created the insurgency in Iraq which we are now fighting, and that our presence there, far from protecting us from Jihadists, is in fact increasing their power and number world wide.

To paraphrase Molly Ivins, we are deep inside a nasty hole in the ground from which we have to escape, yet we are trying to dig down to find a way out. That is what is known as a counter-productive strategy. You don't win a fight by making your enemy stronger. But that is exactly what we are doing.

As Diane Rhem's guests made so clear, getting out of Iraq will be very difficult. But as the new NIE points out, our presence in Iraq is contributing to our ultimate defeat there, while offering no possibility of actually winning.

We should be working to defeat the Jihadists, not to strengthen them. It really is time for us to go.

Bush has lost the war.

It is now completely clear that Bush has lost the war. Not his voluntary diversion into Iraq, the idiocy that was supposed to somehow remake the middle east. No, bush has completely lost the war on Terrorism. From the Associated Press by way of Yahoo News we get the most recent report on the real enemy of America (other then the conservatives, racists and religious extremists who make up today's Republican Party.) The real enemy? Al Qaeda.

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned. The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it. [Snip]

Counterterrorism analysts produced the document, titled "Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West." The document focuses on the terror group's safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Al-Qaida is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," the official said, paraphrasing the report's conclusions. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."

The group also has created "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives," the official quoted the report as saying.

At the same time, this official said, the report speaks of "significant gaps in intelligence" so U.S. authorities may be ignorant of potential or planned attacks.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, echoed the concerns about al-Qaida's resurgence during testimony and conversations with reporters at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen testified. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising."

So while Bush has been spending American tax money money like he was the spendthrift alcoholic son of an extremely wealthy father and telling American service people to lay down their lives in the great side-track of Iraq, al Qaeda has been quietly rebuilding all it lost from the invasion into Afghanistan and becoming an even greater threat to America.

Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld carefully allowed bin Laden to escape when he was surrounded at the complex at Tora Bora. For this great service, Gen. Tommy Franks was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The misbegotten war in Iraq has since drained American resources from Afghanistan where they could have been applied directly to al Qaeda, while creating a diversion in Iraq that has attracted Jihadists from all over the Arab world to attack Americans. Iraq has also created the greatest motivator for Jihadists to join al Qaeda that that organization has ever had, while attracting otherwise unrelated terrorist groups to use the name al Qaeda in order to build up their own reputation and recruiting power.

The result has been sharply reduced resources available to actually fight al Qaeda troops, allowing them to grow more powerful based largely on their reputation for being able to "stick it to the Americans" in Iraq.

There has never been a better example of utter incompetence in the Presidential Office than George W. Bush. Nearly six years now he has supposedly fought against al Qaeda, with the result that al Qaeda is at least as powerful now as they were six years ago on 9/11.

Consider this for an example of extreme incompetence in action. The so-called war on terror couldn't have gone much worse for America if Bush had simply continued to ignore terrorism after 9/11 as he did before that date.

How can you tell he is al Qaeda? He's in Iraq and he's dead.

Back in the deep dark days of the Vietnam War "news" reports based on military handouts would tout the number of Viet Cong killed in the latest military operation. After several years, some reporters actually did some reporting and asked the military personnel submitting body counts up the chain of command how they knew the dead bodies were Viet Cong.

The reply? "They are dead, aren't they? What are they going to do? Argue?" When asked how they determined that some were civilians and some were Viet Cong, the reply was "Kill them all and let God sort out the bad guys." Here appears to be a story of this type. 17 killed, reported as al Qaeda by the military. But were they really just a local defense force killed by U.S. aviation as they were themselves attacking a local insurgent stronghold? Sure looks like the "Kill them all and let God sort them" program.

This week Glenn Greenwald makes the point that now the reporters just take the military press handouts in Iraq and print them as truth. I guess they have to. Wouldn't want to lose the propaganda war now, would we? I mean, look what happens when real reporters get loose and start telling that devastating "Truth."

Last week Glenn pointed out that recently every dead Iraqi has become a dead member of al Qaeda. Somehow the minor detail that there are over 20 different militias attacking Americans, both Shiite and Sunni seems to have been lost in the translation. I guess the U.S. government has decided that it is too difficult to specify that one attack on Americans was conducted by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Shiite), another by some Sunni local militia, and a third by foreign fighters who have been attracted to Iraq because that's the place to go if you want to kill Americans.

So the Army is doing us all a favor by "simplifying" the news so that even the dumbest or most radical of Americans (*cough* Bush or Cheney *cough*) can tell who is "us" and who is "them." The news media is just going along with the program.

Wouldn't want to be accused of rocking the boat by real reporting, now would they? Just keep it simple for the stupid ignorant public.

What's the old saying? If you can't trust your own government, who can you trust? As the Bush administration has proven, the answer is that you can trust no one. Especially not this Bush administration or the military they have sent to fight the useless war in Iraq. Nor can we trust the media to give us honest news.

But it isn't just our own government and media lying to us. The enemy is doing a better job of propaganda than the Americans. Here is from John Hughes writing June 20, 2007 at the Christian Science Monitor:

Now some US military officers, too, charge that a clever enemy media campaign is gaining traction and that the US is losing the war in information about battlefield operations.

A Marine officer whose credibility I trust cites an operation of success in the Fallujah region earlier this month that was reported as a disaster by US and British media companies. His unit had established a new precinct headquarters for Iraqi police, Army troops, and US Marines to patrol and protect a dedicated area. It was well received by the local populace and almost 200 Iraqis volunteered for police recruitment. Insurgents sought to disrupt it but were routed.

Meanwhile, in a separate firefight at a makeshift suicide vehicle factory, three separate suicide bombers were killed, two suicide trucks were discovered and blown up, and foreign and other fighters were killed or captured. On the defending side, one civilian and one policeman were wounded, with no US or other casualties. "The enemy was killed in his tracks; his best weapon was discovered before it could cause any harm," says the officer, "but Western media reported no enemy killed in these operations, 28 civilians killed, and 50 civilians wounded. We are getting demolished," the Marine officer says, "by nefarious enemy media outlets … 'reporters' or 'sources' for Arab and other news agencies either on insurgent payrolls or who have known sympathies with insurgent operations, and by collective Western media that are often being manipulated by enemy elements. What incredible economy of effort the enemy is afforded when US media is their megaphone. Why spend precious resources on developing your own propaganda machine when you can make your opponent's own news outlets scream your message louder than you could ever have hoped to do independently?"

Clearly the insurgents have taken to heart the message that their war is a war of words as well as arms.

So what is happening? The U.S. military can't get the news media to report anything except spoon-fed propaganda hand-outs, while the insurgents appear to be effectively getting the media to report their handouts while suppressing the real news that might support American efforts. In the meantime, those of us who depend on the media to provide some level of reliable and useful information can't find much of it in the major media sources.

Sure the media is getting manipulated on all sides. That is a problem the media has to solve. They aren't doing much of it, except for McClatchy News.

It really is frustrating.

U.S.Occupation of Iraq is financially strengthening al Qaeda

The world wide effort to battle terrorist organizations had, until about a year ago, been putting great pressure al Qaeda. It was believed that al Qaeda was quite strapped for funds. According to Greg Miller at the L.A. times that ended about a year ago when Pakistan withdrew troops from the northeastern area abutting Afghanistan.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.

The key point to look at is this:

"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

This information comes from a renewal of effort by the CIA in Pakistan to target bin Laden and his deputy, al Zawahiri.

The evolving picture of Al Qaeda's finances is based in part on intelligence from an aggressive effort launched last year to intensify the pressure on Bin Laden and his senior deputies.

As part of a so-called surge in personnel, the CIA deployed as many as 50 clandestine operatives to Pakistan and Afghanistan — a dramatic increase over the number of CIA case officers permanently stationed in those countries. All of the new arrivals were given the primary objective of finding what counter-terrorism officials call "HVT1" and "HVT2." Those "high value target" designations refer to Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

The surge was part of a broader shake-up at the CIA designed to refocus on the hunt for Bin Laden, officials said. One former high-ranking agency official said the CIA had formed a task force that involved officials from all four directorates at the agency, including analysts, scientists and technical experts, as well as covert operators.

The officials were charged with reinvigorating a search that had atrophied when some U.S. intelligence assets and special forces teams were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 to prepare for the war with Iraq.

This is a reversal of priority for the Bush administration. Late in 2005 the CIA disbanded the special unit which had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

More from the LA Times Article:

In a written response to questions from The Times, the CIA said it "does not as a rule discuss publicly the details of clandestine operations," but acknowledged it had stepped up operations against Bin Laden and defended their effectiveness.

"The surge has been modest in size, here and overseas, but has added new skills and fresh thinking to the fight against a resilient and adaptive foe," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in the statement. "It has paid off, generating more information about Al Qaeda and helping take terrorists off the street."

The CIA spies are part of a broader espionage arsenal aimed at Bin Laden and Zawahiri that includes satellites, electronic eavesdropping stations and the unmanned airplanes.

This kind of effort is what the attack on al Qaeda after 9/11 should have looked like. Instead, for some reason the Bush administration used the opportunity to redirect American efforts in the a fruitless preemptive attack on Iraq which has reduced American security rather than increased it.

The results of the misguided decision to attack Iraq instead of al Qaeda are surprisingly expressed by President Jimmy Carter recently and published in the International Herald Tribune:

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," the Nobel Peace Prize winner told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."

Think about that. America's values as seen to be applied around the world were one of the strongest elements that led to America's success over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. By reversing those values the Bush administration has made America a much less powerful nation in moral terms. The occupation of Iraq on no real security grounds is seen as the reversal of American moral values among other things.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a major element in strengthening al Qaeda, and contributes greatly to the violence in that country. Cheney, Bush and the Bush administration argues that the U.S. cannot pull out of Iraq without strengthening al Qaeda and leaving behind even greater violence and chaos than is there right now, but all fact-based indicators suggest that it is the presence of our troops which motivates much of the trouble in that country.

A good analogy might be that the U.S, troops in Iraq are the equivalent of a stick in a wasps nest being shaken around, and the wasps will continue to attack anything close to the nest until the stick is removed, at which time they will calm down.

The funds flowing from Iraq to al Qaeda is just another example of excited wasps reacting to the presence of the stick (the American troops) in Iraq. We will greatly help the iraqi people and ourselves when we remove our troops from Iraqi soil. The sooner the better. The arguments against our pull-out have little left to support them if our presence there is strengthening al Qaeda and its affiliates while it motivates Iraqis themselves to attack our troops.

Al Qaeda in Iraq DOES have WMD's!

The suicide bombers of al Qaeda-in-Iraq have begun taking trucks full of poison gas (Chlorine) and attaching explosives. Then they have driven them into shopping crowds and blowing them up.

Voila! WMD's! Next they are going to drive those trucks through Europe, onto ships in the North Sea, Holland and Belgium, drive them off in New Jersey, and blowing them up HERE in the U.S.!

Worse! If we pull out of Iraq, al Qaeda will line up a series of Cessnas, strap Chlorine tanks on them and fly them to America. No tall American building will be safe! They have WMD's! Yaaaahhhhh!

Richard Minter presents this really powerful and threatening story because the Mainstream Media is overlooking the grave danger of such WMD's to America.

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Do you feel threatened yet? This is a bigger threat than the WMD's Cheney, Bush, Rice and the NeoCons used to stampede Americans to adopt the doctrine of preemptive war, then apply that doctrine in Iraq.

[h/t to both Atrios and Instaputz.]

Rumor - has bin Laden died?

I have no reason the believe that this story is reliable or it is not, but some journal called "The First Post" out of the UK claims that bin Laden recently died of thypoid in a hospital in Pakistan.

The story is written by someone calling himself "Robert Fox". A quick Google Search revealed that there is a well-known journalist and broadcaster of that name who is defence correspondent for the Evening Standard as well as a senior associate fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies in King's College, London.

Here is what "the First Post" says about itself.

Read the article. See what you think. If you find any independent support for the death of bin Laden, leave me a comment or send me an email with your source and what they said. This is not yet news. It amounts to a suspicion, placed in type, without known sources.

Vignette from "The Looming Tower"

Robin Varghese posted a small story about Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (the second in command of al Qaeda) from his time in Sudan. It is so short I can't post just a part of it to tease you into reading it, but it is so graphic that you will not forget it after you have. Please go to 3QuarksDaily and read it.

If the book interests you, here is a link to it at Barnes & Noble.


The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Wonder where al Qaeda is Now? Read Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright provides a brief status report on al Qaeda over at Abu Aardvark.

I find it interesting and plausible, but don't know enough to evaluate it beyond that. I suggest reading it and then looking for confirmation/disconfirmation.