When WikiLeaks released leaked US diplomatic cables in November 2010, it caused an emormous uproar in US circles. Yet, numerous issues were uncovered that would at least cause embarrassment to the US. One of those issues was Iraq and it seemed that despite revelations years before about torture, civilian killings etc, this has all continued.
Cables reveal that US action in Iraq continues to be questionable
Media organizations, Journeyman Pictures and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism had advanced access to the released cables and produced a documentary for the UK’s Channel 4 Dispatches series, looking at some of the leaked information and what it revealed about Iraq.
It showed how the US has killed many innocent civilians, continued torture (even after public revelations about them), and so much more. On their introductory page to the following video clip of their documentary, they give a small example of what these cables reveal:
George Bush said, “In the new Iraq there will be no more torture chambers, the tyrant will soon be gone, the day of your liberation is near”. But the files show that rather than being the driving force for occupation, Al Qaeda flourished under the alienation bred by coalition troops. A handful of references to Al Qaeda in 2003 rises to 8000 in 2008. Troops manning checkpoints or riding convoy shoot at anything that moves: killing a doctor taking a pregnant woman to hospital, and the parents of a fourteen year old girl who was heard to cry: “Why did they shoot us? We were just going home!”. And though the army said they weren't recording the death toll, 69 000 out of the 109 000 deaths recorded in these pages, were civilians.
WikiLeaks is an organization that publishes submissions of documents that are normally not public, usually from anonymous sources as news leaks. Started in 2006 it has won awards from organizations such as Amnesty International and the Economist for exposing issues around the world (not just the US, as has been the case more recently).
In 2010 it started releasing documents that made the US look quite bad, especially in Iraq. Towards the end of 2010, it started to release the first of 250,000 confidential US diplomatic cables that have been leaked and since then has found itself under immense media criticism in the US, some even calling for it to be officially classed as a terrorist organization.
This caused an enormous uproar in the US, and debates about WikiLeaks itself rages on, (whether it is indeed performing a democratic function of providing information citizens should know, even filling the gaps of the mainstream media that fails to do this, whether it has gone too far, etc).
The organization has found itself in the spotlight on numerous fronts, for example, some Internet hosting companies severing ties, their web site facing denial of service attempts, various service providers being pressured to or cutting ties with the organization (e.g. payment providers), and so on. Their founder Julian Assange has also found himself facing charges of rape, which many find suspicious as a flagrant attempt to silence someone who is seen as a thorn in the side of the US establishment. Each of these issues themselves are their own pages, but are not covered here at this time.
However, in the context of Iraq, it revealed more about what has been going on, and confirms more many of our general cynicism about politicians; they say one thing, but another thing is often done.
This web site is not going to be able to cover the WikiLeaks saga (as I don’t have the time and resources that the mainstream media has, and there is a LOT of mainstream coverage about this anyway), though from time to time, this site will highlight some of the issues that the leaked information reveals.
For further information: News on Iraq from Inter Press Service, whose stories are carried on this web site From the Guardian (one of the few news outlets around the world to whom the US diplomatic cables were released) Iraq War Logs, looks at “391,832 previously secret US military field reports and details the unvarnished and often unknown realities of the war in Iraq” The US Embassy Cables, coverage of WikiLeaks and the US diplomatic cables that were leaked (including a searchable database of cables) WikiLeaks more general coverage about the organization
By Ernesto Londoño Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A05
BAGHDAD -- Seven years after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, dozens of Iraqis representing various insurgent groups checked into a five-star hotel in Istanbul this spring to plot a comeback. Days later, members of the outlawed Baath Party held a public meeting in Damascus, Syria, to hail the party's rebirth.
The unusual anniversary gatherings rankled Iraqi and American officials. Although the groups don't have large constituencies in Iraq, officials worry that their appeals could gain traction amid a political crisis in Iraq that has weakened the government and left the Sunni Muslims who were dominant under Hussein feeling newly disenfranchised.
Attendees at the Istanbul meeting included representatives of the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the al-Rashideen Army, which were among the Sunni insurgent groups formed to fight the U.S. occupation. Leaders of the loosely connected groups have tried unsuccessfully to band together in the past. The creation of U.S.-backed Sunni paramilitary squads in 2007 deflated the insurgency, driving some leaders into exile and forcing others to pledge to help the Americans.
As the U.S. military draws down, many Iraqi Sunnis who aligned themselves with the United States say they feel abandoned and vulnerable in a country run by Shiites. Until recently, insurgency leaders had kept a relatively low profile from exile in countries such as Syria and Jordan.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned Turkey and Syria for allowing the gatherings, and in an interview he accused them of helping to destabilize Iraq.
"The only ones benefiting are al-Qaeda and the terrorist organizations," Maliki said. "Thus, our advice to our friends and brothers: Terror does not know borders, religion or ethnicity. They are now attacking Iraq because there are suitable circumstances, and tomorrow they will attack Turkey and others."
Feeling shut out
The groups could find receptive audiences in Iraq if the next government is widely seen as having insufficient Sunni representation. Many Sunnis accuse the Shiite-led Iraqi government of being sectarian, pointing to factors such as the disproportionate number of Sunni detainees and efforts to weed out Sunnis from government jobs.
Sunnis made a strong showing in the March 7 parliamentary elections, propelling the largely secular Iraqiya bloc to a first-place finish. The bloc did not win enough seats to secure the majority needed to form a government, however, making it likelier that an alliance of two Shiite groups will appoint the new prime minister.
"There is no doubt that Sunnis will feel excluded, disenfranchised and marginalized if they are not given a significant share in government," said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group. "After all, it is with this expectation that they agreed to abandon the insurgency during the surge in 2007."
The Sunni insurgency sprang up after the United States disbanded Iraq's armed forces and a large share of its government workforce following the March 2003 invasion. The groups attacked U.S. troops and sought to sabotage their efforts to install a parliamentary system that empowered the majority Shiites.
The indigenous Iraqi insurgent groups were eclipsed in 2006 by the foreign-led organization al-Qaeda in Iraq, which came to control key parts of the capital and large areas in the west and north. Many members of the original insurgency surrendered or joined forces with the U.S. military to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Aside from al-Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates, the insurgent groups that remain have maintained a relatively low profile of late. In the past, they often were divided by rivalries. "It remains unclear how serious a threat to the security of the state they could pose," Hiltermann said. "The Sunnis' greatest liability is their own internal divisions and lack of popular leadership."
Common ground
The key purpose of the April 10 conference in Istanbul was to find common ground, said Rabih Haddad, one of the organizers. He said group leaders were heartened by the possibilities ahead as the U.S. military withdraws amid the political impasse. "The general mood was one of optimism," he said via phone from Beirut.
Haddad said that nearly 250 people representing 20 groups attended the conference. It was held in Turkey, he said, because it is an "open, democratic" country.
U.S. officials have expressed dissatisfaction to the Turkish government, which made clear it played no role in holding the event. American officials tried unsuccessfully last year to have discussions with political representatives of the Sunni extremist groups to persuade them to participate in the political process.
"These groups at that meeting in Turkey had an opportunity to participate in the electoral process here, had they been playing by the rules," said Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East.
Sunni insurgent groups have said the United States will remain the primary target of their violence. But they have also picked fights with the Iraqi government.
"We are not in favor of using force with the government or any Iraqi," Harith al-Dhari, an exiled Sunni activist who heads the Iraqi Muslim Scholars Association, said in a phone interview from Jordan. "But if the Iraqi government continues using force against the resistance and if they don't take meaningful steps toward reconciliation, we will be obliged to defend ourselves."
Correspondent Leila Fadel and special correspondent Jinan Hussein contributed to this report.
A few days after the September 11th attacks—which killed seven times as many people as any previous act of terrorism—President George W. Bush declared that the United States was engaged in a global war on terror. September 11th seemed to confirm that we were in a clash of civilizations between modernity and radical Islam. We had a worldwide enemy with a cause that was general, not specific (“They hate our freedoms”), and we now had to take on the vast, long-running mission—equal in scope to the Cold War—of defeating all ambitious terrorist groups everywhere, along with the states that harbored them. The war on terror wasn’t a hollow rhetorical trope. It led to the American conquest and occupation first of Afghanistan, which had sheltered the leaders of Al Qaeda, and then of Iraq, which had no direct connection to September 11th.
Today, few consider the global war on terror to have been a success, either as a conceptual framing device or as an operation. President Obama has pointedly avoided stringing those fateful words together in public. His foreign-policy speech in Cairo, last June, makes an apt bookend with Bush’s war-on-terror speech in Washington, on September 20, 2001. Obama not only didn’t talk about a war; he carefully avoided using the word “terrorism,” preferring “violent extremism.”
But if “global war” isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors—that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires—who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking.
That approach, along with these scholars’ long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations. In “A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq” (Yale; $30), Mark Moyar, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University, tells us that, in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s pay scale (financed by the protection payments demanded from opium farmers) is calibrated to be a generous multiple of the pay received by military and police personnel (financed by U.S. aid); no wonder official Afghan forces are no match for the insurgents. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor of strategy at the National War College, reminds us, in “How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns” (Princeton; $29.95), that one can find out about Al Qaeda’s policy for coördinating attacks by reading a book called “The Management of Barbarism,” by Abu Bakr Naji, which has been available via Al Qaeda’s online library. (Naji advises that, if jihadis are arrested in one country after an attack, a cell elsewhere should launch an attack as a display of resilience.) In “Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism” (M.I.T.; $24.95), Eli Berman traces the origins of the Taliban to a phenomenon that long preceded the birth of modern radical Islam: they are a direct descendant of the Deobandi movement, which began in nineteenth-century India in opposition to British colonial rule and, among other things, established a system of religious schools.
What is terrorism, anyway? The expert consensus converges on a few key traits. Terrorists have political or ideological objectives (the purpose can’t be mere profiteering). They are “non-state actors,” not part of conventional governments. Their intention is to intimidate an audience larger than their immediate victims, in the hope of generating widespread panic and, often, a response from the enemy so brutal that it ends up backfiring by creating sympathy for the terrorists’ cause. Their targets are often ordinary civilians, and, even when terrorists are trying to kill soldiers, their attacks often don’t take place on the field of battle. The modern age of suicide terrorism can be said to have begun with Hezbollah’s attack, in October of 1983, on U.S. marines who were sleeping in their barracks in Beirut.
Once you take terrorists to be rational actors, you need a theory about their rationale. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, built a database of three hundred and fifteen suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003, and drew a resoundingly clear conclusion: “What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” As he wrote in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (2005), what terrorists want is “to change policy,” often the policy of a faraway major power. Pape asserts that “offensive military action rarely works” against terrorism, so, in his view, the solution to the problem of terrorism couldn’t be simpler: withdraw. Pape’s “nationalist theory of suicide terrorism” applies not just to Hamas and Hezbollah but also to Al Qaeda; its real goal, he says, is the removal of the U.S. military from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries. Pape says that “American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11”; the only effective way to prevent future Al Qaeda attacks would be for the United States to take all its forces out of the Middle East.
By contrast, Mark Moyar dismisses the idea that “people’s social, political, and economic grievances” are the main cause of popular insurgencies. He regards anti-insurgent campaigns as “a contest between elites.” Of the many historical examples he offers, the best known is L. Paul Bremer’s de-Baathification of Iraq, in the spring of 2003, in which the entire authority structure of Iraq was disbanded at a stroke, creating a leadership cadre for a terrorist campaign against the American occupiers. One of Moyar’s chapters is about the uncontrollably violent American South during Reconstruction—a subject that a number of authors have turned to during the war on terror—and it demonstrates better than his chapter on Iraq the power of his theory to offend contemporary civilian sensibilities. Rather than disempowering the former Confederates and empowering the freed slaves, Moyar says, the victorious Union should have maintained order by leaving the more coöperative elements of the slaveholding, seceding class in control. Effective counterinsurgency, he says, entails selecting the élites you can work with and co-opting them.
In “Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies” (Basic; $26.95), Mark Perry describes a little-known attempt to apply Moyar’s model in Iraq. The book jacket identifies Perry as “a military, intelligence, and foreign affairs analyst and writer,” but his writing conveys a strong impression that he has not spent his career merely watching the action from a safe seat in the bleachers. Much of the book is devoted to a detailed description, complete with many on-the-record quotes, of a series of meetings in Amman, Jordan, in 2004, between a group of Marine officers based in Anbar province, in western Iraq, and an Iraqi businessman named Talal al-Gaood. Gaood, a Sunni and a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, suggested he could broker a deal that would make the horrific, almost daily terrorist attacks in western Iraq go away.
Perry’s tone calls to mind a Tom Clancy novel. Tough, brave, tight-lipped officers do endless battle not just with the enemy in the field but also with cowardly, dissembling political bureaucrats in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. The crux of his story is that a promising negotiation was tragically cut short, just as it was about to bear fruit, when the key negotiator, a Marine colonel, was “PNG’d”—declared persona non grata—by Washington and denied entry to Jordan. Not long after that, Gaood died suddenly, of a heart ailment, at the age of forty-four (according to Perry, he was so beloved that his wake had to be held in a soccer stadium), putting an end to any possibility of further talks. It’s startling to read about American military commanders in the field taking on a freelance diplomatic mission of this magnitude, and to imagine that there was a businessman in Amman who, on the right terms, could have snapped his fingers and ended what we back home thought of as pervasive, wild-eyed jihad.
What dominates the writing of experts about terrorism, however, is a more fine-grained idea of terrorists’ motives—at the level of ethnic group, tribe, village, and even individual calculation. Pape thinks of terrorists as being motivated by policy and strategic concerns; Cronin, of the National War College, shares Pape’s view that most terrorists are, essentially, terroirists—people who want control of land—but she is also attuned to their narrower, more local considerations. The odds are against them, because of the natural forces of entropy and their lack of access to ordinary military power and other resources, but, if they do succeed, they can be counted upon to try to ascend the ladder of legitimacy, first to insurgency, then to some kind of governing status. (Examples of that ultimate kind of success would be the Irgun and the Stern Gang, in Israel, Sinn Fein and the Provisional I.R.A., in Northern Ireland, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the West Bank and Gaza.)
Cronin goes through an elaborate menu of techniques for hastening the end of a terrorist campaign. None of them rise to the level of major policy, let alone a war on terror; in general, the smaller their scope the more effective Cronin finds them to be. She believes, for instance, that jailing the celebrated head of a terrorist organization is a more effective countermeasure than killing him. (Abimael Guzmán, the head of the Shining Path, in Peru, was, after his capture in 1992, “displayed in a cage, in a striped uniform, recanting and asking his followers to lay down their arms.” That took the wind out of the Shining Path’s sails. A surprise ambush that martyred him might not have.) Negotiating with terrorists—a practice usually forsworn, often done—can work in the long term, Cronin says, not because it is likely to produce a peace treaty but because it enables a state to gain intelligence about its opponents, exploit differences and hive off factions, and stall while time works its erosive wonders.
Cronin offers a confident prescription, based on her small-bore approach to terrorism, for defeating the apparently intractable Al Qaeda. The idea is to take advantage of the group’s highly decentralized structure by working to alienate its far-flung component parts, getting them to see their local interests as being at odds with Al Qaeda’s global ones. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri have focused on exploiting and displacing the local concerns of the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, and many others, and sought to replace them with an international agenda,” Cronin writes. The United States should now try to “sever the connection between Islamism and individualized local contexts for political violence, and then address them separately.” It should work with these local groups, not in an effort to convert them to democracy and love of America but in order to pry them away, one by one, from Al Qaeda. (“Calling the al-Qaeda movement ‘jihadi international,’ as the Israeli intelligence services do,” she writes, “encourages a grouping together of disparate threats that undermines our best counterterrorism. It is exactly the mistake we made when we lumped the Chinese and the Soviets together in the 1950s and early 1960s, calling them ‘international Communists.’ ”)
Eli Berman, an economist who has done field work among ultra-orthodox religious groups in Israel, is even more granular in his view of what terrorists want: he stresses the social services that terror and insurgent groups provide to their members. Berman’s book is an extended application to terrorism of an influential 1994 article by the economist Laurence Iannaccone, called “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” Trying to answer the question of why religious denominations that impose onerous rules and demand large sacrifices of their members seem to thrive better than those which do not, Iannaccone surmised that strict religions function as economic clubs. They appeal to recruits in part because they are able to offer very high levels of benefits—not just spiritual ones but real services—and this involves high “defection constraints.” In denominations where it’s easy for individual members to opt out of an obligation, it is impossible to maintain such benefits. Among the religious groups Iannaccone has written about, impediments to defection can be emotionally painful, such as expulsion or the promise of eternal damnation; in many terrorist groups, the defection constraints reflect less abstract considerations: this-worldly torture, maiming, and murder.
Berman’s main examples are Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in Iraq, and the Taliban, whom Berman calls “some of the most accomplished rebels of modern times.” All these organizations, he points out, are effective providers of services in places where there is dire need of them. Their members are also subject to high defection constraints, because their education and their location don’t put them in the way of a lot of opportunity and because they know they will be treated brutally if they do defect.
Like most other terrorism experts, Berman sees no crevasse between insurgents and terrorists. Instead, he considers them to be members of a single category he calls “rebels,” who use a variety of techniques, depending on the circumstances. Suicide bombing represents merely one end of the spectrum; its use is an indication not of the fanaticism or desperation of the individual bomber (most suicide bombers—recall Muhammad Atta’s professional-class background—are not miserably poor and alienated adolescent males) but of the supremely high cohesion of the group. Suicide bombing, Berman notes, increases when the terrorist group begins to encounter hard targets, like American military bases, that are impervious to everything else. The Taliban used traditional guerrilla-warfare techniques when they fought the Northern Alliance in the mountains. When their enemies became Americans and other Westerners operating from protected positions and with advanced equipment, the Taliban were more likely to resort to suicide bombing. How else could a small group make a big impact?
The idea of approaching terrorists as rational actors and defeating them by a cool recalibration of their incentives extends beyond the academic realm. Its most influential published expression is General David Petraeus’s 2006 manual “Counterinsurgency.” Written in dry management-ese, punctuated by charts and tables, the manual stands as a rebuke of the excesses of Bush’s global war on terror.
“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the introduction to the manual declares. “They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law.” The manual’s most famous formulation is “clear-hold-build,” and its heaviest emphasis is on the third of those projects; the counterinsurgent comes across a bit like a tough but kindhearted nineteen-fifties cop, walking a beat, except that he does more multitasking. He collects garbage, digs wells, starts schools and youth clubs, does media relations, improves the business climate. What he doesn’t do is torture, kill in revenge, or overreact. He’s Gandhi in I.E.D.-proof armor.
Petraeus has clearly absorbed the theory that terrorist and insurgent groups are sustained by their provision of social services. Great swaths of the manual are devoted to elaborating ways in which counterinsurgents must compete for people’s loyalty by providing better services in the villages and tribal encampments of the deep-rural Middle East. It’s hard to think of a service that the manual doesn’t suggest, except maybe yoga classes. And, like Berman, the manual is skeptical about the utility, in fighting terrorism, of big ideas about morality, policy, or even military operations. Here’s a representative passage:
REMEMBER SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL Another tendency is to attempt large-scale, mass programs. In particular, Soldiers and Marines tend to apply ideas that succeed in one area to another area. They also try to take successful small programs and replicate them on a larger scale. This usually does not work. Often small-scale programs succeed because of local conditions or because their size kept them below the enemy’s notice and helped them flourish unharmed. . . . Small-scale projects rarely proceed smoothly into large programs. Keep programs small.
One problem with such programs is that they can be too small, and too nice, to win the hearts and minds of the populace away from their traditional leaders. The former civil-affairs officer A. Heather Coyne tells the story, recounted in Berman’s book, of a program that offered people in Sadr City ten dollars a day to clean the streets—something right out of the counterinsurgency manual. The American colonel who was running the program went out to talk to people and find out how effective the program was at meeting its larger goal. This is what he heard: “We are so grateful for the program. And we’re so grateful to Muqtada al-Sadr for doing this program.” Evidently, Sadr had simply let it be known that he was behind this instance of social provision, and people believed him. For Berman, the lesson is “a general principle: economic development and governance can be at odds when the territory is not fully controlled by the government.” That’s a pretty discouraging admission—it implies that helping people peacefully in an area where insurgents are well entrenched may only help the insurgents.
One could criticize the manual from a military perspective, as Mark Moyar does, for being too nonviolent and social-worky. Moyar admires General Petraeus personally (Petraeus being the kind of guy who, while recuperating from major surgery at a hospital after taking a bullet during a live-ammunition exercise, had his doctors pull all the tubes out of his arm and did fifty pushups to prove that he should be released early). But Moyar is appalled by the manual’s tendency to downplay the use of force: “The manual repeatedly warned of the danger of alienating the populace through the use of lethal force and insisted that counterinsurgents minimize the use of force, even if in some instances it meant letting enemy combatants escape. . . . As operations in Iraq and elsewhere have shown, aggressive and well-led offensive operations to chase down insurgents have frequently aided the counterinsurgent cause by robbing the insurgents of the initiative, disrupting their activities, and putting them in prison or in the grave.”
Because terrorism is such an enormous problem—it takes place constantly, all over the world, in conflict zones and in big cities, in more and less developed countries—one can find an example of just about every anti-terrorist tactic working (or failing to). One of the most prolific contemporary terrorist groups, the Tamil Tigers, of Sri Lanka, appears to have been defeated by the Sinhalese Buddhist-dominated government, through a conventional, if unusually violent, military campaign, which ended last spring. In that instance, brutal repression seems to have been the key. But the Russians have tried that intermittently in Chechnya, without the same effect; the recent suicide bombing in the Moscow subway by Chechen terrorists prompted an Op-Ed piece in the Times by Robert Pape and two associates, arguing that the answer is for Russia to dial back its “indirect military occupation” of Chechnya.
The point of social science is to be careful, dispassionate, and analytical, to get beyond the lure of anecdote and see what the patterns really are. But in the case of counterterrorism the laboratory approach can’t be made to scan neatly, because there isn’t a logic that can be counted upon to apply in all cases. One could say that the way to reduce a group’s terrorist activity is by reaching a political compromise with it; Northern Ireland seems to be an example. But doing that can make terrorism more attractive to other groups—a particular risk for the United States, which operates in so many places around the world. After the Hezbollah attack on the Marine barracks, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, a decision that may have set off more terrorism in the Middle East over the long term. Immediate, savage responses—George W. Bush, rather than Reagan—can work in one contained area and fail more broadly. If the September 11th attacks were meant in part to provoke a response that would make the United States unpopular in the Muslim world, they certainly succeeded.
Even if one could prove that a set of measured responses to specific terrorist acts was effective, or that it’s always a good idea to alter terrorists’ cost-benefit calculations, there’s the problem implied by the tactic’s name: people on the receiving end of terrorism, and not just the immediate victims, do, in fact, enter a state of terror. The emotion—and its companion, thirst for revenge—inevitably figure large in the political life of the targeted country. As Cronin dryly notes, “In the wake of major attacks, officials tend to respond (very humanly) to popular passions and anxiety, resulting in policy made primarily on tactical grounds and undermining their long-term interests. Yet this is not an effective way to gain the upper hand against nonstate actors.” The implication is that somewhere in the world there might be a politician with the skill to get people to calm down about terrorists in their midst, so that a rational policy could be pursued. That’s hard to imagine.
Another fundamental problem in counterterrorism emerges from a point many of the experts agree on: that terrorism, uniquely horrifying as it is, doesn’t belong to an entirely separate and containable realm of human experience, like the one occupied by serial killers. Instead, it’s a tactic whose aims bleed into the larger, endless struggle of people to control land, set up governments, and exercise power. History is about managing that struggle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, rather than eliminating the impulses that underlie it.
For Americans, the gravest terrorist threat right now is halfway across the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. On paper, in all three countries, the experts’ conceptual model works. Lesser terrorist groups remain violent but seem gradually to lose force, and greater ones rise to the level of political participation. At least some elements of the Taliban have been talking with the Afghan government, with the United States looking on approvingly. In Iraq, during the recent elections, some Sunni groups set off bombs near polling places, but others won parliamentary seats. Yet this proof of concept does not solve the United States’ terrorism problem. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all have pro-American governments that are weak. They don’t have firm control over the area within their borders, and they lack the sort of legitimacy that would make terrorism untempting. Now that General Petraeus is the head of the Central Command and has authority over American troops in the region, our forces could practice all that he has preached, achieve positive results, and still be unable to leave, because there is no national authority that can be effective against terrorism.
Long ago, great powers that had vital interests far away simply set up colonies. That wound up being one of the leading causes of terrorism. Then, as an alternative to colonialism, great powers supported dictatorial client states. That, too, often led to terrorism. During the Bush Administration, creating democracies (by force if necessary) in the Middle East was supposed to serve American interests, but, once again, the result was to increase terrorism. Even if all terrorism turns out to be local, effective, long-running counterterrorism has to be national. States still matter most. And finding trustworthy partner states in the region of the world where suicide bombers are killing Americans is so hard that it makes fighting terrorism look easy.
TIKRIT, Iraq — As he sits in his palatial home’s reception hall, Sheik Munaf Ali al-Nidah denounces the governments of both Iraq and the United States and shakes his head over the vilification of the Baath Party. Above his mantel is a photograph of a smiling Saddam Hussein. A Saddam Hussein watch is wrapped around his wrist.
Mr. Nidah — well known in Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s hometown — ran in last month’s parliamentary elections but lost to a candidate from the secular party of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. He admits that even most of his cousins did not vote for him.
Mr. Nidah’s poor performance among his own relatives illustrates how thoroughly Mr. Allawi has reordered Sunni allegiances. It might seem odd at first glance that voters in a hard-line Sunni area like Tikrit would support Mr. Allawi, who is not just a Shiite but also an enemy of Mr. Hussein.
But as a strong secularist and with the strength of his biography as a former ranking member of the Baath Party, he managed to convince Sunnis that he could end the sectarianism they said had gripped past Iraqi governments and protect the rights they believed had been impeded.
Sunnis, who live primarily in an arc north and west of Baghdad, are seen as crucial to whether Iraq can avoid the sectarian and violence that consumed it after the 2005 parliamentary elections. A spate of explosions and other attacks since the voting on March 7, including bombs detonated outside the Iranian Embassy, have killed more than 100 people and wounded hundreds more. Many blame the political void created by the elections.
In Tikrit, elements of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remain active, and thousands of unemployed men serve as a recruiting base. There are worries that the ranks of the disaffected men could increase, and so, too, violence, if Sunnis feel disenfranchised.
“The Sunnis are concerned about their own participation in the next government, not Allawi’s, but they tied their fortunes to Allawi’s,” said Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director with the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit organization. “They have seen these elections as a possible turning point, an important reason why they joined the surge in 2007,” he added. “They were promised a chance to re-enter the new political order through these elections. If they fail in this quest, all bets are off concerning their future behavior.”
Negotiations between political parties have yielded little progress because voters split almost evenly between Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s State of Law alliance.
There are growing fears among Sunnis, however, that a coalition of Shiite and Kurdish parties could push them to the political sidelines again.
Ibrahim al-Sumydai, an Iraqi political analyst, said that if that happened, the result would be “a great disaster.”
“Insurgents have entered the political process to support Allawi,” Mr. Sumydai said. “If he is not included, the Sunni street will be angry. Things will go back to square one.”
Mr. Allawi’s rise has corresponded with the decline of the Iraq Islamic Party, which has its voting base in Tikrit and other Sunni areas.
In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Islamic Party and its Sunni allies, which had once been a default choice for Sunnis, even those who were not religious, won 44 seats and were given the posts of vice president and speaker of Parliament.
The organization represented Sunni aspirations and controlled patronage in Sunni areas, and its members helped persuade tribal leaders to turn against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in 2006 and 2007, which together with the American troop surge quelled the insurgency. Since then, the party has been rattled by infighting and defections, including that of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who joined Mr. Allawi’s list.
Now, after winning only six seats in the March elections — even though the total number of seats in Parliament was increased to 325 from 275 — the party has little bargaining power and has been largely absent from talks among the coalitions vying to form a new government.
Some in the party appear ready to write its obituary. Even some leaders acknowledge that many Iraqis have long believed that the organization was corrupt and incompetent and fomented sectarianism, and that Mr. Allawi’s candidacy simply represented a better hope for Sunnis.
“The public has seen us for the past seven years defending them, but not changing anything,” said Rashid al-Izzawi, an Islamic Party leader who was not re-elected.
Still, the support for Mr. Allawi in Sunni areas, which constituted his base, appears tepid — the best choice among lesser options.
And though Mr. Allawi’s coalition won a majority of the votes in Sunni areas, voter participation was generally down from 2005. In Salahuddin Province, of which is Tikrit is the capital, turnout fell to 73 percent this year from 88 percent in 2005. Turnout was also down sharply in heavily Sunni Diyala Province and increased only slightly in Anbar and Nineveh Provinces, which are also predominately Sunni.
In Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s coffin rests inside a building closed to the public to prevent it from becoming a gathering point for Baathists.
Some people go so far as to say that Mr. Allawi represents the best hope for restoring the sense of pride they lost when Mr. Hussein was deposed.
“I think Allawi has views that are close enough to Saddam Hussein, and a personality that is close to Saddam Hussein,” said Muhammad Majeed, 36, who is unemployed. “He is not sectarian. He’s a tough politician, and he is serious in his work.”
Many others said they turned to Mr. Allawi only after becoming disenchanted with the Sunni religious party.
“ “I know he is Shiite, but he is secular and he will work for us,” said Ziad Atta, 42, a trader. “And I think he will work in our interest.”
Others in Tikrit do not believe that Mr. Allawi is the answer for Sunnis. Machsoud Shahb Ahmed al-Mula, who leads the provincial council, declined even to mention Mr. Allawi by name.
“It’s better to keep our personal views to ourselves,” he said. “This is a dangerous time.”
Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Tikrit.
Three classified U.S. profiles of key Icelandic figures. (1) Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir; (2) the then Icelandic Ambassador to the U.S., Albert Jonsson; (3) Minister of Foreign Affairs and External Trade, Ossur Skarphedinsson. The profiles form briefing documents for U.S. officials visiting Iceland. While the documents are relatively lowly classified and careful to be diplomatic, the tone and certain facts are notable; for instance, speaking on the (then) Icelandic Ambassador to the U.S: "he protested privately when explanations of alleged use of Icelandic airspace by CIA-operated planes were three weeks late in arriving and, in his view, inadequate, but worked with US diplomats to downplay the issue publicly.". Similarly, views about the figures in relation to NATO and other U.S. issues are explored.
This classified CIA analysis from March, outlines possible PR-strategies to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. After the dutch government fell on the issue of dutch troops in Afghanistan last month, the CIA became worried that similar events could happen in the countries that post the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF-mission. The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential / No Foreign Nationals.
This document contains an update to a list of 28167 claims, totaling over 40 billion euro, lodged against the failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing Bank hf. The document is significant because it reveals billions in cash, bonds and other property held with Kaupthing by a vast number of investors and asset hiders, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanly, Exista, Barclays, Commerzbank AG, etc. It was confidentially made available to claimants by the Kaupthing Winding-up committee.
This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. ``The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out''. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ``trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers'', the report recommends ``The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site''. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ``Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website''. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks---U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
Quote for a US$85 million line of credit from FirstCaribbean to the government of the Turks & Caicos Islands. The loan is to be used for refinancing existing liabilities held by FirstCaribbean & Citibank ($26M), reduce an overdraft facility ($15M), cash reserves (US$10M), pay creditors $(US$33M) and "transactions costs". The intern TCI Government is controlled by the Consultative Forum. Our source states that forum members demanded access to this document but were denied access to it.
This document contains a list of 28167 claims, totaling over 40 billion euro, lodged against the failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing Bank hf. The document is significant because it reveals billions in cash, bonds and other property held with Kaupthing by a vast number of investors and asset hiders, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanly, Exista, Barclays, Commerzbank AG, etc. It was confidentially made available to claimants by the Kaupthing Winding-up committee.
This document was submitted to the UK's High Court by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in September 2009, as a Defence against a libel claim brought against them by the oil company Trafigura. A May 2009 BBC Newsnight feature suggested that 16 deaths and many other injuries were caused by the dumping in the Ivory Coast of a large quantity of toxic waste originating with Trafigura. A September 2009 UN report into the matter stated that 108,000 people were driven to seek medical attention. This Defence, which has never been previously published online, outlines in detail the evidence which the BBC believed justified its coverage. In December 2009 the BBC settled out of court amid reports that fighting the case could have cost as much as 3 million pounds. The BBC removed its original Newsnight footage and associated articles from its on-line archives. The detailed claims contained in this document were never aired publicly, and never had a chance to be tested in court. Commenting on the BBC's climbdown, John Kampfner, CEO of Index on Censorship said: "Sadly, the BBC has once again buckled in the face of authority or wealthy corporate interests. It has cut a secret deal. This is a black day for British journalism and once more strengthens our resolve to reform our unjust libel laws." Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN, said: "Forced to choose between a responsible broadcaster and an oil company which shipped hundreds of tons of toxic waste to a developing country, English libel law has once again allowed the wrong side to claim victory. The law is an ass and needs urgent reform." Now that this document is in the public domain, the global public will be able to make their own judgment about the strength of the BBC's case.
Confidential Feb 25 offer (conveyed around 10AM, GMT) from the Icelandic Icesave negotiation team to their British and Dutch counterparts. Iceland agreed to cover all monies associated with the UK-NL Icesave payouts, but forcefully objects to a 2.75% "profiteering" fee demanded by UK-NL over and above base interest rates.
Confidential offer from the UK, dutch Icesave negotiation teams to their Icelandic counterparts. Iceland is to cover all monies associated with the UK/NL Icesave payouts, all currency and recovery risks, base interest as well as an effective 2.75% additional fee. The 2009-2010 period is excerpted from interest charges, which the offer values at 450M euro (how the figure is derived is not specified, but it equates to approx. 5.5% PA on 4 Bil EUR). The offer appears to be designed to be leaked, as it contains rhetoric about "tax payers" and similar irrelevancies. Indeed a sentence from the offer appears in a Reuters article filed at 18:04 UTC, February 19, six hours before the confidential offer was sent to the Icelandic government. In the Reuters' article, phrases are quoted from the offer by an anonymous source, clearly a sanctioned British official, although this is not stated by Reuters. Similar "sources" selectively quoted the document to other media outlets including Channel 4 and the Guardian on February 25, 2010.
Cryptome.org is a venerable New York based anti-secrecy site that has been publishing since 1999. On Feb 24, 2010, the site was forcibly taken down following its publication Microsoft's "Global Criminal Compliance Handbook", a confidential 22 page booklet designed for police and intelligence services. The guide provides a "menu" of information Microsoft collects on the users of its online services. Microsoft lawyers threatened Cryptome and its "printer", internet hosting provider giant Network Solutions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA was designed to protect the legitimate rights of publishers, not to conceal scandalous internal documents that were never intended for sale. Although the action is a clear abuse of the DMCA, Network Solutions, a company with extensive connections to U.S. intelligence contractors, gagged the site in its entirety. Such actions are a serious problem in the United States, where although in theory the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press, in practice, censorship has been privatized via abuse of the judicial system and corporate patronage networks.
Abschlussbericht der Studie "Bedeutung von Wettbewerb im Bereich der privaten Krankenversicherungen vor dem Hintergrund der erwarteten demografischen Entwicklung", angefertigt durch das Berliner Institut fuer Gesundheits- und Sozialforschung (IGES) im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums fuer Wirtschaft (BMWI). Die Studie, datiert vom 25. Januar 2010, wurde von BMWI Ressortchef Rainer Bruederle (FDP) in den Giftschrank verbannt. Die ZIP Datei enthaelt Kurz- und Langfassung der Studie.
This document, released by WikiLeaks on February 18th 2010 at 19:00 UTC, describes meetings between embassy chief Sam Watson (CDA) and members of the Icelandic government together with British Ambassador Ian Whiting.
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
Short version
Full version
The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.
After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".
Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.
WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.
WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.
WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.
What changed between 1991 and 2003 Iraq invasions? (Apr. 3, 2010)
The Morocco author Fatema Mernissi wrote in 1991 “Islam and democracy” after the first invasion of Iraq by President Bush the father or senior. In 2002, she wrote an introduction to the English edition. In 2010, the French editor Albin Michel asked Mernissi a fresh introduction to the updated French edition. Mernissi suggested that the English introduction should be fine and Michel replied: “Do you think that nothing happened between 2002 and 2010 that young Europeans might be interested in knowing?”
After a good night sleep Mernissi realized that among the many changes, apart that Islamic/Arabic youth are double the Western rate, one change stands out grandly: In 1991, the Arabs were terrified of Western supremacy in technology (smart bombs for example that CNN kept showing their devastating effects in collateral damages on civilians); in 2003 invasion it was clear that the American and British soldiers were the most scared of Islam virulence. Mainly, Islamic/Arab States had acquired the numeric information technology for disseminating instant news in sound, pictures, and videos and had begun rational communication discussions (jadal) on points and counter points to the benefit of every Arab/Moslems living in European States and the USA.
The unilateral monopoly in the diffusion and dissemination of information and “intelligence” was eroded: Moslems and Arabs could now enjoy 36 satellite channels broadcasting everywhere, including the most popular Al Jazeera channel that even the Western Medias watched for current and impartial news. Moslems in China were able to keep up with the rest of Islamic World events.
This information victory scared the Western civilization after it realized that the new Islamic/Arabic generations are no longer attuned to their local monopoly Medias run by dictators and monarchs: it is internet age and youth want changes and to discourse rationally. In 1991, Arabs had practically the CNN to cover the war in Iraq as direct source of information and it was biased toward showing the effects of “smart bombs” and Iraqi soldiers being shoveled alive under in the dune bunkers. Arab people got familiar with the term “collateral damages” and CNN failed to inform on the casualties. In 2003, Arab/Moslem masses had Al Jazeera channel to cover the war among 32 other satellite channels viewed for free. It is estimated that by 2012, Islamic/Arab States will have over 1,200 free channels as option for the world to watch information and discussion sessions.
For example, since 1948, Israel has devoured all Palestine and waged countless major pre-emptive wars and the Arab masses had to rely on American Medias for totally biased information; the pickiest watchers occasionally selected the BBC. Things have changed in this numeric information age. In 2003, Al Jazeera was offering as bonuses well targeted discussion panels with many foreign figures. For example, in 2001 and before the September attack on the Twin Towers, Al Jazeera ridiculed Taliban for bombing the ancient giant Buddhist idols in Bamyan (Afghanistan) while Richard Keller of the giant oil multinational UNOCAL was proclaiming “Taliban is good thing for us”
Western humanists grabbed the successes of the Islamic/Arabic satellite channels to become regular guest stars. For example, Dany Schechter of “Plunder: Investigating our economic calamity and the subprime scandal”; Adam Hochschild of “Burry the chains: Prophets and rebels in the fight to liberal”; and Chris Hedges of “War is a force that gives us meaning” are regular guests on Arab satellite channels.
Most ironic, it is the USA and a few European States that have been pressuring the obscurantist Arabic State dictators and monarchies to suppressing freedom of opinions and to shut down “controversial” Arabic channels. In France a few city mayors ordered Arabic channels banned for dissemination because the Arabs and Moslems living in these cities were hooked to Arabic channels and their mind being “poisoned” away from France patriotic indoctrination and inclusion programs.
JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq — Early this year a “fob in a box” — military slang for 80 shipping containers with all the tents, showers and construction material needed to set up a remote forward operating base — was put on trucks here for the trip from one war to another.
Left over and never used in Iraq, the fob rumbled north to Turkey, east through Georgia and Azerbaijan, by ship across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, then south on the old Soviet rail lines of Uzbekistan into northern Afghanistan. There — the end of a seven-nation, 2,300-mile, two-and-a-half-month odyssey — it was assembled just weeks ago as home for several hundred of the thousands of American forces entering the country.
In trying to speed 30,000 reinforcements into Afghanistan while reducing American forces in Iraq by 50,000, American commanders are orchestrating one of the largest movements of troops and matériel since World War II. Military officials say that transporting so many people and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, weapons, housing, fuel and food in and out of both countries between now and an August deadline is as critical and difficult as what is occurring on the battlefield.
Military officials, who called the start of the five-month logistics operation “March Madness,” say it is like trying to squeeze a basketball through a narrow pipe, particularly the supply route through the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So many convoys loaded with American supplies came under insurgent attack in Pakistan last year that the United States military now tags each truck with a GPS device and keeps 24-hour watch by video feed at a military base in the United States. Last year the Taliban blew up a bridge near the pass, temporarily suspending the convoys.
“Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now,” said Lt. Gen. William G. Webster, the commander of the United States Third Army, using one of the extravagant historical parallels that commanders have deployed for the occasion. He spoke at a military base in the Kuwaiti desert before a vast sandscape upon which were armored trucks that had been driven out of Iraq and were waiting to be junked, sent home or taken on to Kabul, Afghanistan.
The general is not moving elephants, but the scale and intricacy of the operation are staggering. The military says there are 3.1 million pieces of equipment in Iraq, from tanks to coffee makers, two-thirds of which are to leave the country. Of that, about half will go on to Afghanistan, where there are already severe strains on the system.
Overcrowding at Bagram Air Base, the military’s main flight hub in Afghanistan, is so severe that beds are at a premium and troops are jammed into tents alongside runways. Cargo planes, bombers, jet fighters, helicopters and drones are stacked up in the skies, waiting to land.
All lethal supplies — weapons, armored trucks, eight-wheeled Stryker troop carriers — come in by air to avoid attacks, but everything else goes by sea and land. The standard route from Iraq to Afghanistan is south from Baghdad and down through Kuwait, by ship through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to Karachi, Pakistan, then overland once again. The “fob in a box” went on an experimental and potentially less expensive journey through Turkey to link up with a new northern route through Central Asia, which was opened last year for supplies going to Afghanistan from Europe and the United States as an alternative to the risky trip through Pakistan.
Both routes circle Iran, by far the most direct way to get from Baghdad to Kabul, but off limits because of the country’s hostile relationship with the United States. “These are the cards that we’re dealt,” said Gen. Duncan J. McNabb, who oversees all military logistics as the leader of the United States Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.
Nonlethal supplies flowing into Afghanistan include cement, lumber, blast barriers, septic tanks and rubberized matting, all to expand space at airfields and double, to 40, the number of forward operating bases in a country that has an infrastructure closer to the 14th century than the 21st.
Gen. David H. Petraeus of the United States Central Command, in another grand historical parallel, recently called the construction under way “the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar,” a reference to the conqueror of Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C.
Food shipments alone are enough to feed an army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which provides meals for 415,000 troops, contractors and American civilians each day in both wars, shipped 1.1 million frozen hamburger patties to Afghanistan in March alone, compared with 663,000 burgers in March 2009. The agency also supplied 27 million gallons of fuel to forces in Afghanistan this month, compared with 15 million gallons a year ago.
Commanders say that their chief worry is that the equipment and supplies will not arrive in sync with the troops. Their biggest enemy, they say, is the short time between now and August, the deadline set in separate plans for each war.
Early last year, President Obama and military commanders agreed on a withdrawal plan to reduce United States forces in Iraq to 50,000 by Aug. 31 ( 97,000 United States troops are there now), with all American forces out by 2011. Late last year, he pushed commanders to speed up the infusion of new troops into Afghanistan — military planners had originally said it would take 18 months — so that 30,000 new troops would get there by August. So far, about 6,000 of those reinforcements have arrived. Once they all get there, there will be close to 100,000 United States troops in Afghanistan.
“There is a great sense of urgency in getting in and getting effective,” said Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency. “The administration is concerned about being able to show results quickly.” There are obvious strains, he said, but “I think it’s doable.”
In the meantime, General McNabb, in yet another reference to Alexander the Great, said that when he took over the transportation command in 2008, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reminded him of the well-known words attributed to the famous conqueror: “My logisticians are a humorless lot; they know if my campaign fails they are the first ones I will slay.”
Mr. Gates had his own words of advice. “He just said, ‘Hey, it’s a tough job, better figure it out,’ ” General McNabb said.
When WikiLeaks released leaked US diplomatic cables in November 2010, it caused an emormous uproar in US circles. Yet, numerous issues were uncovered that would at least cause embarrassment to the US. One of those issues was Iraq and it seemed that despite revelations years before about torture, civilian killings etc, this has all continued.
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