Pakistan, the US and Afghanistan - things are getting tough

Pakistan is a weak nation, one in which the central government does not control all of its' assumed land area or all of its' internal institutions. The Pakistani Army is probably more powerful than the civilian government, and the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) agency, ostensibly an agency of the Army, is very probably more powerful than either the civilian government or the Army itself. The Obama White House has rather clearly decided that the ISI obstructionism has gone on long enough.

(Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top U.S. military and intelligence leaders delivered a tough warning to Pakistan on Thursday to cut suspected ties with militant groups which have upset relations between the uneasy allies.

Clinton led a heavyweight U.S. team at talks in Islamabad to

press Pakistani counterparts on U.S. accusations that Pakistan assists militants who launch attacks on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border and increasingly threaten U.S. interests.

"The meeting lasted for four hours. It was extremely frank, the discussion was very detailed," a senior U.S. official said after the meeting, adding that more discussions were planned for Friday.

The visit by Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, was a sign that Washington is determined to get its message across amid rising tensions among three key players in the Afghanistan war.

The meeting included Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, the powerful army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who heads the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) agency which U.S. officials have singled out for its alleged support of militant groups.

Earlier on Thursday during a visit to Kabul, Clinton said it was time to send a "clear, unequivocal message" to Pakistan that it must step up efforts to broker an end to the decade-long war in Afghanistan and crack down on safe havens used by militants.

"They must be part of the solution and that means ridding their own country of terrorists who kill their own people and cross the border to kill in Afghanistan," Clinton said.

It's clear that Pakistan's cooperation is going to be necessary to resolve the US combat situation in Afghanistan, and the leaders of the ISI are aware of that. They are depending on that fact to keep the US from punishing Pakistan as a nation for the bad behavior of the ISI. The message from Secretary Clinton is clearly part of the process of ramping up the pressure on Pakistan.

All we are seeing is what each side is willing to tell the media. The US may be ramping up the pressure, but Pakistan has both India and China sitting on its borders threatening it. With those two nations as immediate threats, the US is going to have to really ramp up the pressure to even be noticed. So I do not envy Secretary Clinton in delivering the message that the US has had enough. I'm glad she is doing it, though. It is necessary.

Richard Holbrook and the war in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is too expensive for America to sustain and must be brought to an end in a way that lasts. Richard Holbrook knew this and was working to make it happen when he died last December. The end will be achieved through negotiations, not through military actions, and the end will be based on making Pakistan - not Afghanistan - a safer and more stable nation. Stability in Afghanistan is simply unattainable. Pakistan is the key.

But the Pakistanis do not view America as a reliable ally. They well remember that America simply abandoned them in 1989 when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and they are not going to trust America again.

Nicolas Kristoff has taken Richard Holbrook's notes and published an op-ed about what Holbrook thought America needed to do about the war in Afghanistan.

Vali Nasr, a member of Holbrooke’s team at the State Department, puts it this way: “He understood from his experience that every conflict has to end at the negotiating table.”

Nasr says that Holbrooke’s aim for Afghanistan was “not cut-and-run, but a viable, lasting solution” to end the civil war there. If Holbrooke were still alive, Nasr says, he would be shuttling frantically between Islamabad and Kabul, trying to take advantage of Bin Laden’s killing to lay the groundwork for a peace process.

To do that, though, we have to put diplomacy and development — and not 100,000 troops, costing $10 billion a month — at the heart of our Afghan policy. Holbrooke was bemused that he would arrive at a meeting in a taxi, while Gen. David Petraeus would arrive escorted by what seemed a battalion of aides. And Holbrooke would flinch when Petraeus would warmly refer to him as his “wingman” — meaning it as a huge compliment — rather than seeing military force as the adjunct to diplomacy.

As for Pakistan, Holbrooke told me and others that because of its size and nuclear weaponry, it was center stage; Afghanistan was a sideshow.

“A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential,” he noted, in the musings he left behind. He believed that a crucial step to reducing radicalism in Pakistan was to ease the Kashmir dispute with India, and he favored more pressure on India to achieve that.

Holbrooke was frustrated by Islamabad’s duplicity. But he also realized that Pakistan sheltered the Afghan Taliban because it distrusted the United States, particularly after the United States walked away in 1989 after the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. And renewed threats of abandonment won’t build trust.

Steve Clemons provides an excellent explanatory comment on Holbrook's views, particularly an analysis of how the American experience in Vietnam should be compared to the current experience in Afghanistan/Pakistan. It's important to remember the differences in how America entered Afghanistan compared to how America entered Vietnam. Vietnam was entered through a long series of decisions which led to 500,000 American troops in country. That was an outcome that would never have been accepted if it had been proposed initially when Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers to Vietnam.

In constrast, America was directly attacked out of Afghanistan because of the government of the Taliban and their honored and protected guests, al Qaeda. After 9-11 the American people in a very bipartisan reaction sent troops into Afgnistan. This was a major difference.

Holbrooke thought that the war in Afghanistan was too heavily militarized. It must end, and when it does it will be ended through negotiations. Those negotiations will be based on civilian diplomacy with the military as only a support to the process. With the war as heavily militarized as it is today (under Obama) it will be very difficult to even begin significant negotiations, let alone use them to end the war.

It is really important to remember that a successful conclusion for America in Afghanistan will be achieved through the center of political gravity in that area - in Pakistan. As highlighted above, “A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential”. America, and especially the American Congress, sees Pakistan as an unreliable ally. How could the Pakistani government claim to be an ally to America and yet be obviously protecting bin Laden in the military garrison town of Abbotabad?

But it was America's abandonment of Pakistan in 1989 when the Soviets left Afghanistan that drives the Pakistanis to support al Qaeda and the Taliban. Those organizations will be there in South Asia long after America cuts and runs and Pakistan will have to deal with them. The Pakistani leadership recognizes that America is a short term ally who is not reliable in the long run.

This is one reason why the militarization of the Afghanistan war is so important. America is spending $10 billion a month on the military in Afghanistan. This is simply unsustainable and will stop, more likely sooner rather than later. This drives the ultimate solution to the war in South Asia into a civilian negotiation and will drive America out of the region as a military force. That seems obvious.

We need to take the lessons that Richard Holbrook would be teaching if he had not died last December. Everything drives the events in Afghanistan/Pakistan towards non-military negotiations. There will not be a military solution.

During those negotiations “A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential” That tells us who matters in the negotiations. People who can destabilize Afghanistan re much less important than those who can destabilize Pakistan. In order of priority from the top down that is top members of the Pakistani military, leaders of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and then members of the Pakistani government.

The Pakistani ISI it part of the South Asia problem

The recent problem in which the American CIA station chief in Islamabad was "outed" and forced to leave the country, probably by members of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, is just part of the South Asia problem. The arrest and convictions of David Coleman Headley, an American who participated in the Mumbai terror attack, has provided a great deal more information about the relationship between the Pakistani ISI and the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence service has been accused for years of playing a "double game:" acting as a front-line U.S. ally in the fight against terror while supporting selected terrorist groups which serve Pakistani interests.

Now, for the first time, there is a detailed inside account of how that game is played. The U.S. investigation of the 2008 Mumbai attacks [1] has built a strong case that officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) collaborated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in the plot that killed 166 people, six of them Americans. U.S. and Indian investigators say their understanding of the ISI-Lashkar alliance is drawn from the confessions of David Coleman Headley, an American convicted of participating in the Mumbai plot, as well as documents, phone records and electronic eavesdropping.

Officials from both countries say they are persuaded that ISI officers recruited and trained Headley in spying techniques and gave him money and instructions to scout targets in Mumbai and elsewhere. Headley has told investigators that a Pakistani Navy frogman helped plan the maritime attack on Mumbai, according to a 119-page report recounting his interrogation this year by Indian authorities. The report, which was obtained by ProPublica, quotes Headley as saying his Pakistani intelligence handler took part in a discussion about a subsequent Lashkar plot to attack a Danish newspaper -- information that Pakistan did not share with Danish authorities.

In essence, U.S. and Indian officials say, Headley was more than a terrorist: He served as a Pakistani spy.

During the period that ISI officers allegedly helped Lashkar plan to kill Americans and Jews in Mumbai, the intelligence service was working closely with the CIA and U.S. military in counter-terrorism efforts and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was pledging his support for the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials deny any link to Lashkar and point out that hundreds of ISI officers have died in clashes with militants. They accuse India of politically motivated distortion in the report on Headley's interrogation.

"It is a stereotype, a Pakistan-specific version of an Indian interrogation," said a Pakistani official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "The Indian version is totally distorted and fabricated as there was no involvement of the ISI whatsoever. Nor did any serving official interact with Headley or any of the perpetrators."

But U.S. investigators see much of Headley's account as credible, U.S. officials said. The investigators believe his main handler, a man identified only as Major Iqbal, was a serving member of ISI and one of several Pakistani intelligence officers who had contact with Headley, according to U.S. officials.

The Obama administration has expressed frustration with Pakistan's failure to bring to justice the suspected masterminds of Mumbai and to rein in Lashkar, the ISI's longtime proxy army against India. Recent intelligence shows Lashkar remains intent on striking the West, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity.

While the civilian government of Pakistan denies that the ISI was involved in the attack on Mumbai, their denial has to be recognized as necessary because if they failed to deny the ISI involvement then they would be admitting that the Pakistan government is so weak that it cannot prevent rogue elements of the ISI from attacking Pakistan's neighboring countries. Admission of that weakness could easily attract internal opponents to try to replace them. The same dynamic applies to the public complaints the government makes about the American drone strikes against the Taliban in North Wiziristan even though elements of the government are said to be providing targeting information to the Americans in order to guide the drone attacks.

My previous articles on Pakistan are

• CIA Chief in Islamabad reportedly exposed by Pakistani ISI
• US reported to be considering expanding operations inside Pakistan

US reported to be considering expanding operations inside Pakistan

Reuters reports that U.S. Commanders are considering expanding U.S. special operations activities inside Pakistan..

The U.S. troops in Afghanistan are reported to be gaining control over previously Taliban controlled portions of Afghanistan, but Taliban leaders and fighters have a reasonably safe sanctuary inside neighboring Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is not going after those Taliban, so U.S. commanders are talking of doing it themselves.

The following analysis is mine. As indicated in the previous post, I have no credentials that give me any special qualifications to perform this analysis, nor do I have an information that I have not provided links to in this and the previous post.

The leak of the identity of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad may have been the initial public example of the battle between the CIA and the ISI. The Pakistan government over the weekend denied that the ISI had anything to do with that leak, but what would they say? We did it?? It seems reasonable that the leak that led Reuters to post this report is the next stage in bringing that conflict into the public and putting additional public pressure on the ISI, the Pakistani military and on the Pakistan government.

As indicated in today's Reuters story, the U.S. and its NATO allies are all discussing leaving Afghanistan beginning next Summer. But as long as the Taliban leaders are sitting fat, dumb and happy in Pakistan next door and the Afghanistan government cannot control anything outside of Kabul then for the U.S. and NATO to leave means the Taliban will swoop in and regain control over all the territory they had previously held. Unless...

An escalation on the weak point in the battle for Afghanistan - Pakistan - is a very rational move to be making at this time. Either the U.S, will have to carry out the threat to go into Pakistan or the Pakistanis are going to have to clean out the Taliban on their territory themselves.

The next step in this will happen quite soon. No telling what it is or what we will see in the media, but it has to happen soon.

Wondering why Major Hasan attacked the US Army at Fort Hood

I don't think there is much doubt now that Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US soldiers and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood Thursday. There have clearly been a lot of reports about the event in the news since then, many inaccurate. But it is not at all clear what happened yet.

I am a retired Army Reserve Major who has spent quite a bit of time at Fort Hood. I also love the Army. It is my family, as much as is my real family. Major Hassan killed my brothers-in-arms. The emphasis is on brothers (or sisters.) But Major Hasan was also one of us. How could he do this? I know he is only a doctor and not a real soldier, but I'm an Ordnance officer and a REMF. Neither of us are (were) combat arms. We were both technicians supporting the guys at the tip of the spear. It's still my family. I need to know what the fuck happened.

The LA Times offers an early report that seems to me to get to some of the answers. But first we need to look at how he got where he is. Major Hasan was a graduate of Virginia Tech. The reports I have seen say that he graduated in 1997. He must have been a damned good student, because he convinced the Army to send him to Medical School. It's one of the Army programs designed to train Army Doctors. He obtained a degree in Osteopathic Medicine and was further trained as a psychiatrist. The training required a commitment to serve in the Army for a number of years. I think it is very important that the commitment was made well before 9/11.

There appears to be no question that Major Hasan was born in the U.S. He is a native born American. He is also a devout Muslim. Is he an eldest child? I'd bet he is. His parents are Muslim, so he has to be in order to please them. And since he is native born American, he is especially devout. He is pleasing his parents. (OK. Pop psychology. But I'll bet it is true.)But it makes him very different from his peers and it makes it very difficult for him to find a wife. He is very demanding that she be devout and practicing Muslim. The important thing is that it means that at age 39 he is still alone and without anyone to support him emotionally. He is a lonely man. Since Muslims consider dogs unclean, he probably doesn't even have a dog.

9/11 was clearly a major event in Major Hasan's life. He was a devout Muslim in the Army after Muslims had attacked America in a big way. Many "Americans" have considered the battles since then to be wars between Christian America and Islam. Then Captain Hasan clearly was questioned regarding his loyalty, even if not officially.

He as already a loner. The questions regarding his loyalty would have driven him even further into distrust of those around him. It doesn't really matter if the questions come from only one in fifty of those around him, the questions are what he would have taken to bed with him at night before falling asleep. It sounds like his profession was his social life.

But his profession was psychiatrist in the Army when the Army was at war with Muslims. And he was a Muslim. Major Hasan's job since the invasion of Iraq has been to listen to and deal with the confessions of American soldiers who very often were confessing war crimes against Muslims.

Major Hasan's identity seems to have been very much wrapped up in his religion. He is at his core a Muslim. How does he feel listening to people who have killed Muslims, often for no better reason than the fact that they were Muslim?

There is a known psychological disorder called Compassion Fatigue. It is common among individuals that work directly with victims of trauma. as they hear more from the victims they themselves literally shut down.

So here we have a man whose profession is to help the enemies of his people deal with the stresses of killing his people. He is also a man who is a loner, one who cannot find a wife who is sufficiently devout.

But he is committed to serving in the Army because they sent him to Medical School and to the advanced training. He asked to leave, but was denied. Then they tell him he is not doing his job satisfactorily because (apparently) he was professing his religion. Then they reassign him and inform him that he is going to be sent to Afghanistan, a war he does not believe should be fought.

So he broke. And he committed a violent suicide, by killing others and expecting to be killed in the process.

He was defending both himself and his religion. His experiences listening to individual American who came back from Iraq will have clearly demonstrated both that Muslims were being killed, war crimes were being committed, and that for many of the American soldiers it was considered a war between Christianity and Islam - a crusade. This would have built into a case of Compassion Fatigue.at the very least. But it would have been more for Major Hasan, since it was his coreligionists who were being killed.

The fact that Major Hasan broke is, in retrospect, no real surprise. The failure to predict is was a clear failure in the Army Medical system. Every psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker should have a personal counselor to help the individual deal with their job, and major Hasan either had none or the individual was too influenced by the needs of the Army to deal properly with the Major.

Why was Major Hasan pushed into this position? The current military was never designed to fight a war this long without calling up the reserves or a draft. The American military has been pushed to the breaking point, and this is another of the cracks it has demonstrated. It is a surprise and a credit to the American military that this kind of event has not happened more often. As it is, the increase in suicides, murders and PTSD demonstrates just how much we Americans are demanding from our military. It is too much and long past too much.

Major Hasan is only another example of the idiocy of the Bush administration. The invasion of Iraq should never have been undertaken unless the Reserves were called up and then the draft were activated. But that was not something the Bush administration felt they could have sold to the America people. They knew how obviously idiotic it was. Iraq is not a war that should have been fought. Then, Afghanistan may have been reasonable, but it simply has not been fought. The resources it required were sent to Iraq, and there was no rational strategy for winning there. Again, it is an example of Bush administration incompetence. Afghanistan couldn't be fought with Iraq and without the draft. The result has been that the American ground military has been destroyed. Major Hasan's actions in Fort Hood are merely one more example of a broken military.

This evaluation of what Major Hasan did is, of course, speculation based on news reports. Someone familiar with Major Hasan's career and file might find a very different time line and situation. But I'll bet based on what I have seen in the last two days this is pretty close.

ABC News has a good story on Sgt. Kimberly Munley who was the civilian police officer who stopped Major Hasan. She saved a lot of lives.

McChrystal's plan for Afghanistan is now available to the public

If you want to read General McChrystal's plan, here it is in pdf format. It is dated August 10 and signed by both U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and by commander of U.S. forces Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is a combined Civil-Military plan.

Want to bet that the Bush administration under Cheney and Rumsfeld would never had presented a plan that covered both the military AND the Civilian aspects of the war?

Politico has a discussion of the plan here.

I'll read it and discuss it later.

Here's why Gen. David McKiernan was sacked as Afghanistan commander

Gen. David McKiernan was fired as American commander in Afghanistan and replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This is the first U.S. commander fired during war time since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War. It was so far out of the ordinary way of treating American Generals during combat that eyebrows rose all over the place. What the Hell happened? Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post now explains.

In mid-March, as a White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan was nearing completion, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in a secure Pentagon room for their fortnightly video conference with Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Kabul.

There was no formal agenda. McKiernan, a silver-haired former armor officer, began with a brief battlefield update. Then Gates and Mullen began asking about reconstruction and counternarcotics operations. To Mullen, they were straightforward, relevant queries, but he thought McKiernan fumbled them.

Gates and Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan's answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You're going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy.

The humiliating removal of a four-star general for being too conventional reveals the ferocious intensity Gates and Mullen share over a growing war that will soon enter its ninth year. It also demonstrates their zeal to respond to President Obama's demand for rapid success in a place where foreign armies have failed for centuries.

McKiernan is an old school American general. You don't get more hard corps old line American than being an Armor Commander. Armor, Artillery and to a lesser extent, tactical air (close air support), are the epitome of conventional war.

What's so old line about being an Armor General? That's a logistics war, big army against big army. The commander who can bring the greatest numbers against the weak point of the enemy normally wins. And what are "the greatest numbers?"

The numbers that matter in conventional war are rounds of ammunition and tons of ordnance. A conventional commander coordinates the firepower of more weapons on the battlefield to greater effect than does the commander of the enemy forces. The ultimate weapon in conventional war is a nuclear weapon. The most important resources for the winning commander come from either the largest economy or the greatest population. The commander's most important skills are coordinating the use of these resources - logistics.

How do you defeat the army that posses an essentially unlimited number of rounds of ammunition and ordinance to drop on you? The Chinese tried overwhelming numbers of troops, which works as long as the opponent isn't losing so badly they resort to nuclear weapons and you have enough troops. Since many of the Chinese troops used in Korea were previously Kuo Ming Tang troops and as such politically unreliable, they were expendable and available. But human wave attacks were not the best solution. A few years after Korea, the Algerians adapted Leninist guerrilla techniques and applied what is now called asymmetric warfare against the French. You don't offer the dominating power an army for a target. The new strategy was effective. Algeria is no longer French dominated even though the French had both the police forces and the conventional army with the conventional power. The asymmetric warfare technique migrated to South Vietnam and defeated the U.S. military also.

Asymmetric warfare was a logical solution when the occupation following American conventional invasion of Iraq was so badly screwed up by the American conservatives from the Heritage Foundation and the Bush administration who sent them there. The attempt to impress a foreign political ideology will always fail with it does not match the existing culture the ideologues attempt to impress it on. Such an effort creates a perfect ground for asymmetric warfare. So how does it work?

Instead a conventional army, you place highly skilled and very political cadres into the population and convince the population that the conventional forces and police of the government are their enemy. That is done in several ways. First, make promises that, given power, the cadre will focus on and provide for the needs of the population. Whatever can be done to back these promises up makes them more credible, so the cadres have humanitarian needs organizations - with political brands. This is easier when the government has no similar humanitarian efforts.

Second, conduct guerrilla operations against the enemy military and police that cause them to attack the population as the source of those operations. The extreme version of this is terrorist operations in which the attackers are prepared to and plan to die in the attacks. The most effective of these cause a massive counter reaction by conventional forces against the general population. Such efforts also create martyrs who have died to benefit the population. It really helps the insurgents when the government is inherently corrupt, since the population will always recognize this and act to reject it. How do you think the Iraqi population reacted to the corruption of Blackwater and Halliburton? Was there any doubt that these organizations represented the Bush administration? Since the conservative American philosophy of individualism with no regulation encourages such corruption, the Conservative philosophy creates its own enemies.

Afghanistan is a political war. Where is the effective conventional warfare counter for these asymmetric techniques? Conventional warfare has only one solution - destroy every last member of the cadre of insurgents, and if they keep being recreated from the population (as they will be), conduct genocide on the population. This has been the Soviet reaction in Chechnya. It hasn't worked very well there, and with the most modern forms of journalism, works even less well. The media has become a major theater in such wars now. That's because the battleground is the minds of the population involved.

LtC. John A. Nagl in his superb book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam describes the traditional U.S. military conventional war culture beautifully. It is a culture that permeates both the military forces and, more important, the American political culture. You can tell that Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Chrystal are violating it because they are accused of being "political generals." The American culture of war fighting looks down on "political generals", but that is the essence of fighting an asymmetric war successfully.

In the American political culture, Americans fight wars against other armies. When America is at peace, the military is subordinate to the political leaders, but when America is at war, the military leaders determine how the war will be fought. That includes the political effects, because modern wars are total wars in which both the military and the civilians are combatants. Let's not forget that both WW I and WW II were won in large part because the American economy was nationalized and directed by the government planners. That's the definition of total war. In total war, there is no essential difference between the civilian sector and the military sector. America fights modern wars in which scientific logic based on observable facts dominates the actions taken by both armies and civilians. West Point was created in 1803 and run by the Army Corps of Engineers to create an officer corps dominated by scientific thinking rather than the traditional thinking of European armies. West Point succeeded. It has been a major element in creating modern America.

By the way, buy a copy of colonel Nagl's book. Most intelligent and promotable U.S. officers already have.

As a company grade officer during the Vietnam War, I read Mao's writings on how to fight a war. They were inherently political. They started with a dedicated political cadre and worked up to a conventional army, but only as each stage succeeded. The stages were inherently political, not military. As one who firmly believed in logistics and the idea that the biggest battalions win, I was hard to convince. But I was thinking on the wrong battlefield. The conventional war battlefield is just that - armies, trenches and ordnance. The modern battlefield is men's minds. Thomas Kuhn would describe this as a paradigm shift. George Lakoff would describe it as "reframing the issue." Both are correct. But who would have thought that shifting the paradigm or reframing the issue would determine who might win a war? But it does.

And Gen. David McKiernan was not able to make the shift or reframe the issue. That became obvious to Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen. Afghanistan is simply not a war suitable for an armor general who sees war as a challenge for an engineer or logistician. It is a war for a politician. The fact that he was unsuited to win that war was demonstrated by his refusal to accept a face-saving way out of his command.

I don't blame McKiernan. I don't trust political generals, either. I was a logistician. That's my generation. McKiernan was one of our very best. But then, so was General Westmoreland in Vietnam. Let's not forget that we didn't win that one, either.

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.

Here's probably why McKiernan has been relieved in Afghanistan

The change in commanders in Afghanistan is probably very good. It should sharply increase our chances of succeeding in what America wants to have happen there. Success is possible, but it may not be easily recognized as "winning."

As one who well remembers the Vietnam war, having been commissioned into the Army then and having studied why we got into it in the first place, the real problem that led to the build-up to half a million troops was Gen Westmoreland. He was a conventional war General fighting an unconventional war, and his solution was - more troops - more troops. The book and movie "We were soldiers..." and the battle it depicted showed the genesis of his obsession. America won that one battle of attrition. But the strategy it led to caused us to lose the war.

Westie mousetrapped LBJ by demanding a massive increase in troop strength that allowed him to fight a war of attrition against the Victor Charlie. Westie's timing was perfect. It was when LBJ wanted to pass Medicare and the Civil Rights Bill. Had he not given Westie his troops, LBJ knew that the conservatives would have shut down the Congress and LBJ would have passed zilch. So Lyndon gave Westie his troops to pass his bills. Lyndon knew we couldn't win in Vietnam when he did it.

Shift forward to the Afghanistan conflict. Again, a conventional general fighting an asymmetric war, and his solution has been what? More troops. Conventional war generals don't like the strange apparent lack of discipline of Special Forces. They never have, as the Rangers will tell us from WW II.

Bringing in the Special Forces Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is critical to winning in Afghanistan. There is no alternative to winning there, as failure in Afghanistan puts the Pakistani nukes at risk. Leaving a conventional forces general in command is too great a risk to accept

Pakistan supporting Taliban in Afghanistan; Shooting at American helicopters

Two interesting news reports.

First, the Army Times reports that Pakistani military helicopters have been flying over the border into Afghanistan and resupplying Taliban base camps.

Second, BBC reports that Pakistani troops have been shooting at U.S. military helicopters "forcing them back into Afghanistan".

Bush, of course, had pinned all the U.S. hopes on President Musharraf remaining in power in Pakistan. Now that Musharraf is gone, the opposition is reacting to their political base by opposing support for the American troops in Afghanistan. It is clear that at least parts of the Pakistani military Intelligence agency, the ISI, still support the Taliban. The ISI created the Taliban during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, using Saudi Arabian money. The Pakistani government has never controlled the borderland officially inside Pakistan but next to Afghanistan, not even when the British government in India was supposedly in control of that territory.

The combat in Afghanistan is more important than Iraq ever was, and if anything, the Afghan and Pakistani relations are more complicated than Iraq was or is. The Bush administration has never done "complicated" well, preferring brute force military solutions which often don't work. If anything, McCain is even less capable of dealing with complicated than Bush is.

Another reason to vote for Obama in November.

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Addendum 9 23 2008 2:10 pm CDT
A real question is how close is Pakistan to being a failed state. The bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad over the weekend certainly leads to that question. According to the LA Times article, that bombing would have taken out the top leadership of the Pakistani government.

On Monday, the government described just how close those militants may have come to dealing Pakistan an almost fatal blow. A senior official said that President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani and top Cabinet members were supposed to dine together at the Marriott on Saturday night -- but switched venues just before the bombing.

"At the eleventh hour, the president and prime minister decided that the venue would be the prime minister's house," Rehman Malik, the Interior Ministry's top official, told reporters. "It saved the entire leadership."

Malik did not explain what inspired the change in plans. A representative of the hotel later cast doubt on the statement, telling the Associated Press that there were no plans for a government dinner at the Marriott on Saturday.

Malik's disclosure, if true, betrayed the alarming extent to which militants have beefed up their intelligence capabilities and upgraded their planning and operations accordingly.

These recent news reports indicate that Pakistan is having real problems not becoming a failed state.

Obviously the Bush administration has no solution to Pakistan's problems, but the entire Muslim world as well as America and India are effected by it. Both Bush and McCain will look for American military solutions to the problem of Pakistan, while neither can imagine any other possible solutions. But there better be some other solutions. Pakistan is too important to be allowed to fail.

In the meantime, spokepersons deny that U.S. helicopters invaded Pakistani airspace and that Pakistani military fired on them.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan - Pakistani troops and tribesmen opened fire on two U.S. helicopters that crossed into the country from neighboring Afghanistan, intelligence officials said Monday. The U.S. denied the report.

The helicopters did not return fire and re-entered Afghan airspace without landing, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

"There was no such incursion, there was no such event," said Col. Gary L. Keck, Defense Department spokesman.

So apparently the events that happened didn't really happen.

That's what the Associated Press reports, anyway. It's a good thing that the AP has such great and objective reporters on their staff - the Republican shill Ron Fournier in Washington, D.C. reporting on the American Presidential election, for example.

What is the articulated 'desired end-point' in Afghanistan?

Senator Jim Webb, reported in the Financial times (free registration required) asks the key question about what America is going to do in Afghanistan.

He said that the US could be about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. "You have to have an articulable end-point," he said. "We've got to clearly understand what it is that the US wants to do in Afghanistan and understand what we can do." [Snip]

The US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan, according to Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia.

Fresh from ruling himself out as a possible running mate for Barack Obama, Mr Webb's comments come as an implied criticism of the Democratic party's orthodoxy on Iraq and Afghanistan - including Mr Obama's own stance.

Following his recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr Obama welcomed growing support for his plan to set a timeline for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq and said the US "should seize the moment" to build up its presence in Afghanistan.

"The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan," he said.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Webb politely disagreed, without mentioning Mr Obama or other Democratic colleagues by name. "We should be very careful from making it sound like we are withdrawing from Iraq because we have to build up in Afghanistan," he said. "You're starting to see people say this when they weren't saying it before.

"We tend to be country-specific when we talk about how to defeat international terrorism rather than looking at the whole dynamic. The dynamic is that terrorism works the seams of international law. We can't create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can't be our objective."

Senator Webb is exactly right. Without a clearly articulated end goal, there is no coherent strategy and if anything has become clear in the twentieth century, and organization with no strategy will usually lose to an organization with a clearly articulated and consistently implemented strategy.

Both Vietnam and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have suffered from the absence of a clearly articulated and implemented end goal. Afghanistan is shaping up to be another example of this poor management.

Another thing that needs to be applied in Afghanistan is the application of a broad set of methods of achieving the strategy. Sen. Webb does not mention this in the Financial Times article, but the military is a poor tool for defeating a guerrilla or terrorist movement. Terrorism will be defeated through well-coordinated actions that include Intelligence operations, police operations, NGOs that rebuild Afghanistan and wean that nation from the opium crop, together with long term efforts to train and educate a new generation of Afghani's to lead their nation and close coordination and advice to the government of Afghanistan in how to extend the effective reach of that government to those areas not currently under government control. The State Department and America's allies are going to be more important to Afghanistan in the long run than our military forces.

Without a clearly articulated end goal carefully communicated to all subordinate players, all those resources cannot be effectively coordinated to achieve anything strategically useful.

Experience shows that the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this. Cheney and Rove do appear to have had clear strategy that they have tried to implement, but it basically has been to convert the dominant political ideology to the mishmash of confused ideas that have dominated the Republican Party for the last three decades and to institutionalize conservative Republican control of the American government by any means possible. Iraq appears to have been one element in that overall strategy, so it was not considered worthy of strategic action itself. This accounts for the extreme secrecy that characterizes the Bush administration. If the public knew what they were seriously trying to do, most of America would rise up to stop them.

McCain has not articulated any central strategy at all. His goal is clearly just more of the same. The disorganization that characterizes his campaign for the Presidency appears to stem for exactly this same kind of lack of a clearly articulated strategic vision.

Obama? I suspect, from the tightly coordinated and effective nature of the campaign he ran for the Democratic nomination, does understand this. The formulation of that end-goal will have to wait until after Obama is elected President and will require close coordination between at a minimum the Pentagon, the State Department and the Intelligence Community. This is going to be the National Security Diretor's primary purpose for quite a while. In the meantime, the nature of sound byte politics does not allow any articulation of a concept this complex. Don't expect Obama to articulate a clear end goal for Afghanistan until after the election. The Republicans would use it to attack him while avoiding any responsibility for the foreign policy and military disasters their party have conducted in the last eight years.

So I am glad to hear Senator Webb state that we need a clearly articulated end goal for Afghanistan. He is completely correct. Unfortunately, the Presidential campaign will not be about that kind of discussion. Instead it is going to be about how scary the Black Man, Obama, is and why the Republicans don't want him elected.

That probably doesn't matter much, though. Presidential elections are won by the party out of power for three reasons. First, when the economy is in the tank during election year, second when the previous President has very low approval ratings and the third factor is an unpopular war. The first two reasons are going to dominate this year. Iraq will be somewhat significant but McCain's history of getting shot down over Hanoi and tortured as a POW somewhat insulates him from that losing the Presidency because of the unpopularity of Iraq. Clearly that experience did not teach him strategic management, however.

Oh, and I have no idea what the appropriate "articulated end-point for Afghanistan" is. Nor have I yet heard one for Iraq. I just know that America will not win in either place without such a clear statement of purpose.

This is going to remain an interesting year right up to January 20, 2009.

McCain has for years avoided every meeting on Afghanistan of the Senate Armed Service Committee he chairs.

According the the McCain campaign, the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which Obama chairs has not scheduled any hearings on Afghanistan in the last year and a half. So ABC News looked into the issue. And what did they find?

Obama attended the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan in March 2007.

McCain's record is much worse.

Sen. John McCain has attended even fewer Afghanistan-related Senate hearings over the past two years than Obama's one. Which is a nice way of saying, McCain, R-Ariz., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee, has attended zero of his committee's six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years.

This failed message from the McCain campaign is simply political incompetence. It certainly supports the allegations that the McCain is poorly managed.

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.

Rumsfeld, Neocons laugh off death of Pat Tillman

M.J. Rosenberg points out the right-wing Neocon attitude towards the death of Pat Tillman:

I always thought that, for all their loathsomeness, the right cares about our men and women in uniform. Yes, I know that they are all too willing to sacrifice them on the battlefield. But that is war and these people believe that all wars are worth dying in.

But now I see that they even have utter contempt for the individual soldier who dies on a foreign battlefield. Donald Rumsfeld and his GOP allies chuckled their way through yesterday's hearing on the death (friendly fire, murder, whatever) of the most famous soldier serving in the 9/11 wars, Pat Tillman. This is the same soldier whose death they used to drum up support for the war, who they made a poster boy for it.

But then he was killed (somehow) and it came out that he opposed the Iraq war, was not a Christian, and, worst of all, came from a family of troublemakers who demanded to know what happened to their boy.

And now Pat Tillman is, in the words of an army chaplain, "worm dirt." And his death, which may have been a murder, is one big joke to these guys. Rumsfeld, leaving the Committee room, dodged Tillman's family, not offering a word of sympathy. They have none. Read the rightwing blogs on the Tillman case. The once fair-haired boy is now a joke, his death just one of those things, his family a bunch of liberals who should shut just shut the f--- up.

Even the Republican criminals currently in charge of this country don't have to also be loathsome gutter-slime, but Rumsfeld and crew work at it.

---

See also:

• Evidence suggests Pat Tillman was murdered
  July 26, 2007
  
• What is the Bush Admin hiding in the Pat Tillman case?
  July 15, 2007

What is the Bush Admin hiding in the Pat Tillman case?

The basic story of Pat Tillman is clear, and since he was a professional football player who dropped his football career to join the Army along with his brother after 9/11, he got a lot of press.

After completing Ranger indoctrination Tillman was sent with the second battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington into Iraq in the initial invasion, then sent from Iraq to Afghanistan where he was killed on April 22, 2004 while on patrol. The initial report from the Army Special forces Command said that he was killed by enemy fire in an exchange of fire with the enemy resulting from an ambush. Gen. John Abizaid, the Commander of the troops in Iraq and Iran at that time, awarded Tillman the Silver Star, a Purple Heart and a posthumous promotion from specialist to corporal based on a detailed account of the heroic story of his actions - in a battle that never took place and which was known by the Army Commanders to have not taken place.

The Army Commanders immediately knew that Tillman's death was actually a friendly fire incident. So they put his unit under a communications blackout to prevent any communications with reporters and burned Tillman's body armor and uniform. The initial investigation conducted by Army captain Richard Scott concluded that Tillman's death was the result of a lack of discipline that should have brought serious punishment. The investigations by higher ranking officers that have since followed have reached much less harsh conclusions, so the individuals who actually killed Pat Tillman have gotten mild punishment if any at all, and the higher ranking officers have not taken any responsibility for what was a failure of leadership, more clearly in the aftermath of Tillman's death, but from what I have heard, also during the shooting itself.

As a retired Army officer myself, it looks like the living survivors get a lot more mercy than they deserve, the dead remain very dead and so get no mercy at all, and the commanders who failed to properly control the situation or investigate, judge and honestly report the aftermath continue on in their careers with no real accountability. This looks like a prime example of careerism in the military. Pat Tillman, his family, the Army and the American people all deserve much better.

---

Mark Kleiman properly points out how the Democrats should be dealing with this. Congressional Hearings to determine exactly what happened and why, both on a road outside of the village of Sperah, Afghanistan and later during the investigations and cover-ups.

EmptyWheel at The Next Hurrah adds her always considerable political wisdom to Mark Kleiman's proposals.

What gives with Lt. Gen. Lute, the War Czar?

What is up with the Bush administration and the War Czar, Lt. Gen. Lute? As I wrote previously, the position is totally unprecedented in American history. Here is Laura Rozen's comment on the situation:

Is the Lute appointment about the administration shrugging off the legacy of Iraq to the uniformed military? A correspondent writes, "There was this hilarious skit on the Daily Show about exactly this when the czar position was announced. They showed a vin diagram with three overlapping circles, one labeled the White House, the other DoD, and the third the Joint Chiefs -- the 'czar' was supposed to operate at the intersection of the three areas of responsibility. John Stewart asked what that intersection was called, and his 'correspondent' dead-panned: 'The Blame' (which popped up on the screen in bold letters at the intersection of the 3 circles). Brilliant."

What is happening is that George W. bush is bringing in an Army three-star General, assigning him a desk in the National Security Council but making him answerable to Bush alone. The National Security Adviser, Stephan Hadley, is out of the loop. Lute will be giving instructions to the Secretary of Defense and to the Secretary of State.

The fiction is that Lute will be answering to President Bush and will be speaking for President Bush to the Departments of Defense and State. But that is a fiction. Bush has no clue how to deal with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his record shows it. Those wars will belong to Lute.

But not the blame. The fiction is that Bush is responsible, and so Bush cannot blame his telephone for the messages passed to the Secretaries of State and Defense. The fiction is that Lute is a telephone. The reality is that he has to make the decisions.

Once again Bush proves that there is nothing he can get right. His only hope is to pass the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan off to the Democrats in 2008 and set things up so that the Republicans can blame the Democrats. Wait for it. In 2009 the cry will start up "The Democrats lost Iraq to the terrorists!"

Reagan WH knowingly aided Pakistan to build nukes

A news report published today by the Raw Story describes how the Reagan White House avoided the law and helped the sale of nuclear components to Pakistan. Then they lied to Congress about what had been done, and ignored when Pakistan passed nuclear plans and components to North Korea.

In 1988, Pakistan would detonate its first atomic bomb.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has said that the CIA was monitoring Khan from the beginning. He asserts that the US turned down offers to detain Khan in 1975 and 1986 because they wanted to “gain more information” about the scientist’s activities.

Intelligence information later showed that the US and its allies allowed Pakistan to clandestinely acquire most of the technology for its nuclear program from abroad, unwittingly facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya over the past several decades. [Snip]

In 1985—following the arrest of a Pakistani agent in the US who attempted to procure specialized switches for nuclear detonators—Congress took steps to prevent Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons, passing bills that would cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan if it were found to be involved in nuclear activities.

One amendment declared that all overt aid to Pakistan—which came to over $4 billion in 1986—must cease unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Another prohibited aid to any “non-nuclear” nation found to be illegally exporting nuclear materials from the US.

Given Pakistan's proliferation activities, this meant the ongoing aid to Pakistan was illegal. However, President Reagan wanted military and economic aid to continue flowing to Pakistan to ensure its ongoing support of his covert war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

The Reagan White House cold warriors wanted Pakistan's cooperation in the clandestine war the U.S. was fighting against the USSR in Afghanistan at any cost. The non-proliferation forces took a longer view and considered the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable third-world nations too high a price to pay to keep Pakistan totally supporting Charlie Wilson's War.

More important, in my opinion, is that the (mostly) Republican super-hawks, who had never accepted the idea that Nixon did anything to cause his resignation in the face of almost certain impeachment, were reinforced in their belief that Congress was a major barrier in the way of their efforts to "defend" America from its enemies. That justified their efforts to avoid Congressional control - at "any cost."

This same group, many even the same individuals, were utterly shocked that somehow the Democratic hick from Arkansas got elected President in 1992, setting off the perpetual war to remove him. Again, this was worth "any cost." When the impeachment failed, they got George W. Bush to run for President in 2000 and eliminated any other candidate - again at "any cost." Ask Sen. McCain.

That set of attitudes, together with the combination of voter suppression and an extra-Constitutional Florida election decision by the Supreme Court has given us the current Bush White House.

This story is one more building block in the sad structure of failures that characterizes the last six years of the Bush/Cheney regime.

Walter Reed scandal - an annotated bibliography

Dana Priest at the Washington Post has an excellent series describing the problems faced by wounded soldiers and Marines who are assigned to the holding company at Walter Reed Hospital and are outpatients. I am providing an annotated bibliography of the stories so that readers who want to know what is going on can go back to the first report published February 18, 2007, and have continued to report what is happening after that initial report. Most of the reports I have found on the internet have been from the Washington post. I am not ignoring other news organizations unless they are republishing what the Washington Post already reported.

Any suggestions and additional reports would be appreciated. Email me or post a comment after the article here. Thanks.

• US Army denies 'gag orders,' but says patients can 'go to Starbucks' to talk to media
  Raw Story by Josh Catone
  03/01/2007
  The Chief Press guy at Walter Reed claims their instructions to the troops were misunderstood. Patients have to get permission to speak to reporters on the Walter Reed campus, but if they don't want to get permission they can always go to Starbucks to talk.
  [In my opinon this is just an adequate save after some idiot commander put out a stupid order, which was the first half of the above. He was surprised when the Press got all uppity about the Right of free speech, so he then talked to the PR guy (who he should have spoken to before putting out the order) and Army spokesman Paul Boyce told the reporters that the Right to Free Speech had not been taken away, just moved to Starbucks. Decent save in a situation the Army should not have been in the first place.
  
  Oh, and Dana Priest has previously pointed out that Building 18 is NOT on the Walter Reed campus.]


• Live Discussion with Dana Priest
  Washington Post by Dana Priest
  03/01/2007
  Dana Priest answers questions about her Walter Reed series.
  


• Hospital Officials Knew of Neglect
  Washington Post by Anne Hull and Dana Priest.
  03/01.2007
  The top Army medical officers both at Walter Reed and in the Army Medical Command up to the Army Surgeon General knew of the poor conditions of outpatients at Walter Reed since 2003.


• Walter Reed General Relieved of Command
  Washington Post by William Branigin
  03/01/2007
  The Army, finding that blaming a few low-level enlisted persons has not been enough to satisfy the mob Press, relieves the Commanding General of Walter Reed Hospital.
  [Responsibility goes even higher in my opinion. It's a shame the Army and DoD didn't move this rapidly with Abu Ghraib. There is another similarity to Abu Ghraib, however. At Abu Ghraib it was low-level enlisteds blamed first, then mostly low-ranking and Reserve Officers at higher levels. Here it is low-ranking enlisted first, and now Surgeons. When it comes down to it, a General who is a Surgeon is not in the military "flag officers club" really. He is a real surgeon who is considered sort of an honorary General. Surgeons are thown off the sleigh to the wolves before "real" Generals, just like Reserve Officers. They don't belong to the club of "Ring Knockers." [Refers to West Point graduation rings.]


• Military Press Crackdown Extends Further Than Walter Reed
  Editor & Publisher by Joe Strupp.
  02/28/2007
  The military is now preventing reporters from talking to military people on a number of military posts if the stories show bad news.


• Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet
  Army Times by Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
  02/28/2007
  The soldiers and Marines in the Army's Walther Reed Holding Unit have been told that they will get up at 6:00 AM every morning and have a room inspection at 7:00 AM. This is something not normally done after a soldier has graduated from Basic Training. Sure sounds punitive to me. I wonder why? Oh, and they are also forbidden to speak to the Media.
  


• Administrative Issues Cited at Walter Reed
  Washington Post by Steve Vogel
  02/25/2007
  An unfinished Army study of problems in Army Health systems that began in April provides some description of the problems at Walter Reed and other Army medical facilities. The initial problem, surfaced by a GAO study report, were about difficulties with the Army's system for evaluating the fitness of wounded soldiers to stay in the service. The Army's study also surfaced problems in training of workers who assist patients, information-management databases are inadequate and are "policy disconnects" between Army regulations and Defense Department instructions.
  


• Panel to probe conditions at Walter Reed
  Houston Chronicle [from AP] by Robert Burns AP Military Writer
  02/24/2007
  Sec. Def. Gates told reporters that people would be held accountable for the problems at Walter Reed Hospital, and that senior leaders were not immune to accountability.
  


• Review At Walter Reed Is Ordered - Defense Secretary Vows accountability
  Washington Post by Steve Vogel
  02/24/2007
  Sec. Def. Bob Gates appointed an independent Review Panel to investigate the reported conditions at Walter Reed Hospital. Also:

  "The Senate Armed Services Committee has tentatively scheduled hearings on the facility for March 6, said a spokeswoman for the panel's chairman, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the ranking minority member of the committee, toured the facility yesterday."

  Pressure on the Army is building. It's about time.
  


• The Army's Preemptive News Briefing
  Washington Post by Howard Kurtz
  02/24/2007
  Dana Priest spent four months interviewing soldiers and Marines at Walther Reed Hospital about their story, then contacted the Commanding General, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, to get his responses to the findings. Maj. Gen. Weightman asked for time before the story was published to get a response, and Dana Priest gave him six days. Then, before the six days were up, the Press Officer of Walther Reed called in the Washington Post's competitors for a briefing. This was breaking the agreement that Walter Reed had made to get the six days grace period. Kurtz says that Priest let the Walter Reed Press Officer know that she was quite unhappy, and not going to extend such courtesies in the future.
  


• Painting Over the Problems at Walter Reed's Building 18
  Washington Post by Dana Milbank
  02/23/2007
  A quick cleaning, a series of hasty repairs covered by a quick coat of paint, and the Army officials invited the Press in to see the improvement to Building 18. The difficulty is that the problems that are impeding the recovery of wounded soldiers and Marines who were waiting for administrative decisions regarding their futures are in the bureaucracy and are a lot more than just unpainted walls, rats, mnice and cockroaches.


• Walter Reed Stories Factual But Unfair, Medical Chief Says
  Washington Post
  02/23/2007 by Steve Vogel
  Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, chief of the Army Medical Command said that the stories were factual but one-sided.


• Walter Reed Continues Quality Care, Concern for Recovering Wounded
  Army Press Release
  02/22/2007
  This is the Army's first response to the Press about the Walter Reed Hospital articles in the Washington Post starting 02/18/2007


• At Walter Reed, 'We're Going to Fix It'
  Washington Post
  02/22/2007 by Ann Scott Tyson
  Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, promises to repair the facilities for outpatients at Walter Reed.


• Live discussion with Post Staff Writer Dana Priest
  Washington Post by Dana Priest
  02/22/2007
  This covers a lot of comments on the Walter Reed series, as well as other things that Dana Priest has covered.
  


• Swift Action Promised at Walter Reed
  Washington Post by Dana Priest and Anne Hull
  02/21/2007
  "The White House and congressional leaders called yesterday for swift investigation and repair of the problems plaguing outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as veterans groups and members of Congress in both parties expressed outrage over substandard housing and the slow, dysfunctional bureaucracy there."
  


• The Hotel Aftermath
  Washington Post.
  02/19/2007 by Anne Hull and Dana Priest
  This is a continuation of the story from 02/18/2007. Instead of Building 18 it features Mologne House, a military hotel originally intended as a short-term lodging facility for military personnel, retirees and their family members. Now it is used for some of the outpatients from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


• Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility
  Washington Post.
  02/18/2007 by Dana Priest and Anne Hull.
  The first in the WaPo's series of stories on the neglect and mismanagement of wounded outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital. There are almost 700 military wounded, mostly soldiers, some Marines, no longer in hospital beds but still in need of either treatment of administrative decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty. Many are living in old and battered buildings with cockroaches, mice, with old, stained, cheap and battered furnishings. Building 18 is featured in this story.