The celebration riveted the nation. The government spent years in planning, the news media tracked every development, and residents flocked to the events in droves.
The reason for all the hoopla was the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor, which was marked with a week of events around the city that concluded in Lower Manhattan on Sunday. But the place where this anniversary is being celebrated so fiercely is the Netherlands, the small, waterlogged European nation of 17 million people 3,650 miles away.
The Dutch organized and paid for the week’s events, running up a tab of about $10 million. The Dutch media dispatched about 50 reporters to New York, with a major television station running nightly half-hour updates on the proceedings during prime time. And thousands of Dutch citizens crossed the Atlantic to take part, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, who declared New York the greatest city in the world.
But aside from perhaps hearing cannon fire, spotting the stately profiles of the Dutch sailing vessels shipped across the Atlantic for the occasion, or bumping into a gang of blond, blue-eyed sailors in Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers, a busy bunch and long accustomed to spectacle, basically went about life as usual.
“It’s bigger there than over here,” said Babette Bullens, 38, who lives near Holland’s border with Belgium and was making her first trip to New York. “If you talk to New Yorkers, they don’t know what’s happening. It’s very disappointing,” she said in Battery Park on Sunday.
The reason for the Dutch interest, of course, is that the arrival of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, led to the founding of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hudson was British, but his financial backer was the Dutch East India Company. (“Who paid for the voyage,” the crown prince said, “really counts.”)
Dutch claims to the city ended nearly 350 years ago, when control was formally transferred to the British, yet they openly carry a lingering attachment, like that of a spurned romantic.
Jos Rozenburg, a commander in the Royal Netherlands Navy, said the week was a reminder of the country’s once-mighty past. “For us it was the golden age when the Dutch were all over the world,” he said. “It’s something we look back on with great fondness.”
“In a way, it’s refreshing,” said Russell Shorto, the author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” which examines Dutch influence on the development of New York. “The Dutch are a really self-effacing people.”
“The most Dutch thing about the Dutch contributions through history is how little you notice them, because they don’t promote themselves,” said Mr. Shorto, who lives in Amsterdam.
Stephen Chaffee, 54, an American who lives in Holland, came to New York with his wife, Josje, 51, who is Dutch. “She has a tremendous attachment to the idea that Holland contributed to American culture,” Mr. Chaffee said, as the Royal Marine Band played nearby. “I’m beginning to realize how important that is.”
Of course, the celebration has not gone unnoticed in the city. NYC & Company, the city’s tourism organization, has been heavily promoting it for months. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood alongside the crown prince at an opening ceremony on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on Tuesday.
“It was really an extraordinary week,” said Angela Vona, 66, of Manhattan, who attended as many of the activities as she could. “I talk about this to all of my friends and they don’t care.”
That was the case with many of the New Yorkers who stumbled on the celebration’s activities. “It’s just another event,” said Ralph Montuoro, 67, of Queens, getting off his bicycle to negotiate the mostly Dutch crowd in Battery Park on Sunday. “We didn’t even know about it.”
And even if some Dutch were disappointed by the level of interest, most went out of their way to say they understood. “New Yorkers have a lot going on here,” said Vivi van Leeuwen, 34, of Breda. “New York is the capital of the world, and the Dutch are proud of their history here and don’t mind sharing that pride.”
BEIJING — Not long after daybreak, before the city begins its full-throated roar, the shouts and calls can be heard up and down the old alleyways and deep within the walled courtyards that form the crowded heart of the Chinese capital.
With more emphasis on song than lyric, they are the marketing jingles of itinerant fruit vendors, sellers of roasted duck, and stooped men who have mastered the art of resuscitating blunt kitchen knives. Like the familiar whine of cicadas in August, their garbled calls are the soundtrack of the Beijing summer, and many residents look forward to the return of the hawkers’ glutinous rice cakes, mismatched crockery and pet grasshoppers that sing.
Even more numerous than the hawkers are the recyclers, sun-scorched migrants from the countryside who survive by collecting yesterday’s newspapers, spent computers or tattered cotton blankets that will be spun into next winter’s comforters.
“If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve,” said Chen Lin, 37, a bony, animated man who earns about $5 a day salvaging dead appliances and anything else containing metal.
“No one really knows what I’m yelling,” he said, “but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house.”
The singing hawkers and recyclers are reminders of the days when Beijing was a thickly populated maze of hutongs, or alleys, that crept outward from the grandiose imperial quarters occupied by China’s emperors and the officials and artisans who served them.
Cao Huiping, 45, a taxi driver whose childhood compound was stuffed with 17 unrelated families, recalls when vendors filled the air with a cacophony of competing tunes.
“One minute it would be someone selling sugar, then as soon as their song faded it would be the flour dealer, then the fabric salesman,” said Mr. Cao, whose home has since been replaced by an upscale mall. “Now I live in a building where people don’t even know each other and everyone shops at the supermarket.”
Gated apartment complexes are the hawker’s enemy. So, too, are the air-conditioners that drown out sales calls and keep residents inside.
The city authorities are no friends of the street vendors either. Stringent laws and urban management officials, known as chengguan, keep them on the run with fines and harassment. “The best time to be out is lunchtime, when the chengguan are on break,” said Meng Xiandong, 54, a vendor of dried sweet potatoes, as he nervously scanned the crowds.
A good place to get a taste of old Beijing is Qianmen, a poor but colorful quarter south of Tiananmen Square that is a jumble of twisting hutongs and ramshackle houses. On most days, one can find peddlers selling meticulously skinned pineapples, a man offering two kinds of honey — plain and medicinal — and an ornery cobbler who can resole a pair of shoes in as much time as it takes to down a steaming bowl of hand-shaved noodles.
Cradling a brass teapot and watching over three pairs of caged lovebirds, Wu Xiulong, 76, sat in front of the doorway of his courtyard and reminisced about the vendors whose arrival he used to await as a child: the bean-cake man, the corncob seller, the baker who produced the flakiest flatbread. “Oh, back then they were baked on both sides, so crunchy, with sesame seeds,” he said. “It was so delicious. Now they’re all gone.”
Zhao Cai, a 66-year-old knife sharpener, is one of the old-timers who can still be found wandering around with a beaten-up toolbox that doubles as a bench. His call is bracing but melodious, although once he sets to work on a blade, the noise of grindstone on metal brings out the old women with their beloved worn-out cleavers.
“I hate stainless steel,” he said as he pedaled the grindstone. “No one makes knives like they used to.”
Unsentimental and gruff, his accent betraying his hometown in China’s far northeast, Mr. Zhao has been plying his trade for more than 30 years.
“When you’re good at sharpening knives, you get to know everyone,” he said.
How good is he? Customers sometimes foolishly test his handiwork by touching the sharpened edge. “I’ve had ladies draw blood and swear they didn’t feel a thing,” he said.
As he spoke, there was a loud crash behind him, followed by a choking plume of dust. Workers in orange vests were tearing signs off nearby buildings, part of a government campaign to make the neighborhood more attractive to tourists who like a bit less visual chaos in their Old Beijing experience. “I don’t recognize some of the streets around here anymore,” he said before fleeing the advance of the demolition crew.
One man who needs no vocal announcement is Li Hailun, a grasshopper salesman whose wares, hundreds of wingless insects imprisoned in round, woven enclosures, produce a deafening, high-pitched symphony. From July to October, Mr. Li, 28, bikes around the city with his chirping quarry, each of which sells for 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the quality of the song and the gullibility of the buyer. Add a dollar if the critter comes in a graceful wooden cage.
Much of Mr. Li’s village, about a two-hour drive from the capital, is engaged in the grasshopper trade: women weave the cages, boys catch the insects and the men pedal them to nostalgic city dwellers. When sales lag, he heads to the gates of the nearest children’s hospital. Subtracting the occasional fine for vending without a license, Mr. Li pockets $200 a week, a tidy sum for a sorghum farmer biding his time between planting and harvest.
The bugs draw a crowd wherever Mr. Li goes. On a recent day, passers-by debated whether to feed them carrots, scallions or rice. A woman said that toddlers raised alongside a trilling insect were not easily startled by noise.
“When the grasshopper guy comes out, you know summer has arrived,” said a man who was seeking to replace the one, tethered to his rear-view mirror, that was on its last legs.
Mr. Li, ever the salesman, added his own poetic pitch. He declared that the Chinese had been raising grasshoppers for hundreds of years. Even Qianlong, a Qing dynasty emperor, was a connoisseur of the fighting variety.
“Everyone loves grasshoppers,” Mr. Li said. “When they sing, you can’t help but feel happy.”
Abubaker Saddique: 9/12/09 A EurasiaNet Partner Post from RFE/RL
Criticism and anger are mounting over the rescue of a Western journalist from Taliban militants.
The September 9 predawn raid in a remote corner of northern Afghanistan rescued "New York Times" correspondent Stephen Farrell. But four people died in the shoot-out, including Farrell's Afghan colleague Sultan Munadi and a British commando.
Afghan journalists are holding remembrance ceremonies and have staged protests across the country blaming international troops for Munadi's death. They have also criticized NATO commandos for leaving Munadi's body behind after the raid.
Angry Afghan journalists want this incident to be thoroughly investigated. They claim it is emblematic of a larger problem, when such operations often result in freeing Western hostages while caring little for Afghan nationals.
In Britain, media outlets are questioning whether military force should have been used, as negotiations with the hostage takers appeared to be making progress.
The two were kidnapped in northern Konduz Province while reporting on the recent controversial NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel tankers, which killed scores of people.
In a telephone interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan from Paris, Reza Moini, a regional researcher with Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), joined the call for a thorough investigation.
"Our efforts will not be limited to conveying condolences and expressing our sympathies," he says.
"What is important for us is that Munadi's killing happened under circumstances that have raised many questions. That's why our [formal] statement demanded an investigation into this incident. And we want the troops involved in this rescue operation to answer our questions."
Major Rethink
The raid was the second major incident this month which has brought the West's military role in Afghanistan into the spotlight.
According to Afghan officials, an earlier NATO air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers on September 4 killed scores of people, including many civilians. The incident has created rifts among NATO allies and fueled Afghan concerns about the West's military effort in the country.
A quest for a major rethink on Afghanistan is increasingly obvious in Western capitals.
Last week Britain, Germany, and France jointly called for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan to develop a plan for transferring more security responsibilities to the Afghan authorities.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the initiative at a news conference in Berlin on September 6, saying they were launching it together with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Many hopes had been pinned on the August 20 Afghan presidential election, which had been expected to deliver a new administration that would work with its international partners to deliver improved governance and play its role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.
Instead, the elections results have been marred by allegations and investigations of fraud as the Afghan political elite splits into increasingly hostile camps.
In a week of bad news for the country, the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) issued a report on September 11 saying that the Taliban and other militants now have a "permanent presence" in 80 percent of Afghanistan. Another 17 percent of the country, according to the report, has "substantial" Taliban or militant activity.
Training Locals
Nobody seems to have clear answers to the troubling question of what happens next in Afghanistan.
In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, the new Canadian Ambassador in Kabul, William Crosbie, remained cautiously optimistic that despite the deteriorating security situation in southern Afghanistan, where 3,000 Canadians are battling Taliban insurgents, greater training of the Afghan forces could still help in improving the situation:
"We have been working closely in the [Kandahar] Province and the national government to train policemen and to train the Afghan national army to assume a greater role in providing security," Crosbie says.
"But I think the security situation in Kandahar reflects the deterioration in security in various parts of the country, which is of concern to us. The additional resources which ISAF will be bringing into Afghanistan, the increased training, the increased number of Afghan national security forces -- those will be critical to turn around the security situation."
But experts suggest that training Afghan security forces cannot happen in a political vacuum as clouds of uncertainty hang over the Afghan election.
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, has urged critics of the poll not to "jump to conclusions."
Meanwhile, despite an expected request for more troops for Afghanistan by top U.S. and NATO Commander General Stanley McChrystal, senior leaders in America's Democratic Party are now publicly questioning the logic of sending additional soldiers in harm's way.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, is expected to oppose more troops for Afghanistan in a speech on September 11. This comes a day after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that she sees little support among U.S. legislators for sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Such comments put President Barack Obama in an uneasy position.
Pelosi is the highest-ranking Democrat to signal that any White House or Pentagon push for more troops will be resisted in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he is urging Democrats to withhold judgment until Obama decides what to do.
Earlier this year, Obama ordered 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, which would bring the total number of U.S. forces there to 68,000 by the end of 2009.
Editor's Note: RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Jawad Mujahid and Sharifa Esmatullah contributed to this report
Bangladesh needs to seriously take the issue of Myanmar's reinforced military presence along the border to safeguard its national security, a Dhaka-based think-tank says.
The Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS), a think-tank that deals with security issues in South and Southeast Asia, in a publication has suggested that there are many contentious issues with neighbour Myanmar and those need to be resolved for the national interest.
The issues such as Rohiynga and dispute over maritime boundary have daunted the relations between the two neighbours in recent times, says an article of its publication, BIPSS FOCUS.
It says Myanmar's recent strengthening of military presence in the Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh, is a big concern.
"Bangladesh needs to take Myanmar's recent military ambition seriously," the publication says in an article, titled "Bangladesh –Myanmar Relations: The Security Dimension".
It says Myanmar has increased movement of troops while construction of concrete pillars and barbed-wire fences along the border has been sped up.
The military junta in Myanmar has also extended the runway of Sitwee Airport enabling it for operation of MiG-29 multi-role combat aircraft and all 12 MiG-29 aircraft of Myanmar Air Force are presently deployed at Sitwee, the article says. Land has also been acquired for construction of airport at Buthidaung, it adds.
The article says massive repair and reconstruction of road, bridges and culverts are going on in Western Command area while regular disembarkation of tanks, artillery guns, Recoilles Rifles, mortars in Buthidaung river jetty is going on.
Saying that such developments are "alarming" for Bangladesh, the article further says that Myanmar has commenced barbed-wire fencing along the border with Bangladesh since March 2009, and so far approximately 38 kilometer fencing is completed till end of July this year.
Considering all these issues, the article says: "It is observed that Bangladesh-Myanmar relations have developed through phases of cooperation and conflict."
"Conflict in this case is not meant in the sense of confrontation, but only in the sense of conflict of interests and resultant diplomatic face-off," it says.
The article warns that "unfriendly relations with Myanmar can benefit small insurgent groups living in the hilly jungle areas of the southern portion of the Chittagong Hill Tract, which can cause some degree of instability in the area and become a serious concern for national security."
The article also suggests that Bangladesh can benefit in ways by maintaining a good relation with Myanmar, which has a good friendship with China.
"It (Myanmar) is the potential gateway for an alternative land route opening towards China and Southeast Asia other than the sea," it says. "Such road link has the potentiality for a greater communication network between Bangladesh and Southeast Asian countries including Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore."
Moreover, the article says, with a rich natural resource base, Myanmar is a country with considerable potential.
"Myanmar's forests and other natural resources like gas, oil, stones are enormous from which Bangladesh can be benefited enormously," it says.
The article suggests the policymakers review the existing defence priorities to suit the magnitude of threat being faced by the nation.
"The policy regarding Myanmar needs to be a careful combination of effective diplomacy while safeguarding our security interests," it says.
A new audio message, directed at the American people - purported to be from al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden - claims the President Barack Obama will find himself powerless to halt the American-led war in Afghanistan.
The latest audio recording, attributed to Bin Laden, again attempts to justify al-Qaida's September 11, 2001, terror attack on the United States as being part of the group's quest for the liberation of Palestine.
An image made from video, provided by IntelCenter shows a frame from the video released by al-Qaida showing a still image of Osama bin Laden, 14 Sep 2009
The tape was provided by an American-based firm - IntelCenter, which monitors terrorist propaganda. It says the 11-minute video shows a still picture of bin Laden while audio of the address plays.
In the recording, the man identified as Bin Laden reiterates long-standing grievances including American support for Israel and "some other injustices."
He puts forward a reading list of recent books, including one by a former CIA agent, which the tape says will clarify the "message" of the terrorist attack eight years ago.
The recording notes that the Obama administration includes key figures from the previous Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The voice, believed to be that of Bin Laden, thus concludes President Obama is a weakened man and powerless to change course in Afghanistan because of "pressure groups." And, if he tries, the tape says "his fate will be feared" to be like that of the assassinated President John Kennedy and his brother, Robert.
It is the first message believed to be from the reclusive terrorist leader since one in June, in which bin Laden accused President Obama of sowing new seeds of hatred against America among Muslims.
The United States now has about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan - the largest contingent in the 42-nation international force.
Following the September 2001 attack, the United States invaded to oust the Taliban from power in Kabul.
The Taliban had given safe haven to al-Qaida, which had carried out the hijacking of four airliners to attack New York and Washington, in which more than 3,000 people died.
Bin Laden is believed to be in hiding in Pakistan, along the remote mountainous terrain border with Afghanistan. Pakistani leaders have recently said they believe the terrorist leader is dead. But top American officials say there is no credible evidence to confirm that.
The audio recording, posted on a web site, includes an undated photograph of the al-Qaida leader. There is also a scene of a banner with an American flag in the background and the New York City skyline with the destroyed World Trade Center twin towers.
No fresh images of Bin Laden appear. He was last seen in video that coincided with the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attack.
After the tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing mensis horribilis of August, more than a few commentators complained, as one of them put it, that “Obama should have seen it coming.” No one doubted that the current attempt to overhaul America’s uniquely wasteful and unjust system of health insurance and non-insurance would touch off the kind of demagogic, misleading attacks that have greeted every past attempt at ambitious reform, successful (Medicare) and unsuccessful (all the rest) alike. The plan is socialism; government bureaucrats will choose your doctor and prescribe your treatments; the economy will be ruined; taxes will crush you—all that and more was to be expected. But the predominant tone of opposition to the emerging Democratic health-care proposals, and to the President personally, came as a surprise to the White House and a profound shock to many who voted for Barack Obama last November.
Perhaps it was naïve, and obviously it was optimistic, to hope that once Obama—having been elected by a large and undisputed majority, unlike his two predecessors—took office the nastiness of the assault against him would subside. And so it did, briefly. But as the reality sank in that this temperamentally conservative President intends to make good on his substantively progressive promises, the fury returned, uglier than before and no longer subject to the minimal restraints inherent in a national electoral campaign aimed at persuading a plurality of voters. Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens. Obama seeks to indoctrinate children in Marxist ideology and put teenagers in “reëducation camps.” Obama is a Communist. Obama is a Fascist.
This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.
Over the summer, the organism probably succeeded, on balance, in accelerating the decline in Obama’s poll ratings, a decline that was inevitable once the inaugural glow faded, the economic crisis failed to vanish, and the messy, confusing legislative battles began. With the help of what appeared to be White House passivity, it certainly succeeded in demoralizing the center-left, stoking the fears of the ill-informed and persuading the press that health-care reform was in serious, maybe terminal, trouble.
Part of Obama’s task last Wednesday evening, when he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, was to dispel the talk radio–Fox News miasma—to give heart to his nervous supporters in the House chamber and beyond, reassure them that he knows what he’s doing, and bolster their confidence by showing them his. In that, he succeeded. The address was his best as President. Some centrist positioning early in the speech—especially an implication that “those on the left” who favor a single-payer system and “those on the right” who favor leaving everybody to buy health insurance individually are equally “radical”—gave some a sinking feeling. (Medicare is a single-payer system. It is not radical.) But the President’s bipartisan pleasantries only made his firmness more impressive. His civility was matched by fight and fire. He called the death-panels claim—“made not just by radio and cable talk-show hosts but by prominent politicians,” some of whom were sitting in front of him—exactly what it is: “a lie, plain and simple.” And this:
If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open. But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it.
Obama is sometimes faulted for conducting government by speech. But this speech was part of a patient strategy that, despite August’s rough weather, is looking increasingly sound. In 1993, President Clinton delivered a similarly well-received health-care address on Capitol Hill. But he then dumped a detailed, already-worked-out bill in Congress’s lap. The implication: Take it or leave it. Obama has left the bill-writing to the legislators (with intense White House kibitzing, of course) and has waited until the stretch to take the reins. When Harry and Louise torpedoed the Clinton plan’s popularity, Democrats panicked and abandoned the foundering plan. Obama’s approach made it difficult for him to stump for “his” plan, because its shape was necessarily unknown; now his numbers are slipping, too. But slipping poll numbers are less apt to panic members of Congress who have invested themselves in the shaping of the legislation and have had time to reflect on what followed failure last time: the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years.
Obama’s treatment of the “public option”—a kind of mini-Medicare that would compete with private insurance in a limited way—encapsulated his strategy. He defended it passionately, convincing many liberal doubters that he truly believes in it and knows that it would yield better care at lower cost. He also made it clear that he prefers reform without the public option—but with near-universal coverage and an end to “preëxisting conditions,” arbitrary cancellation of insurance, and the fear that losing or changing your job will cost you your savings and perhaps your life—to no reform at all. If it were up to the House alone, of course, the public option would be a lock. But in the filibuster-hobbled Senate the fate of reform may come down to the whims of a tiny handful of preening moderates from states that are mostly empty of people, notably the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus, of Montana, and Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine.
Bipartisanship is a fine sentiment and an appealing tactic, but where health care is concerned it was never a great idea. The boorish South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” at the President after he said, truthfully, that reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” did the public weal a favor by underlining bipartisanship’s futility. A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans. And that’s no lie
By Philip P. Pan Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, September 14, 2009
KIEV, Ukraine -- Five years after Ukraine defied Russia and turned toward the United States and Europe in a peaceful, democratic revolution, Moscow is poised for a comeback in this former Soviet republic.
The pro-Western president who came to power as the hero of the Orange Revolution is struggling with single-digit ratings just months before he stands for reelection. The man Russia backed in 2004 is leading the race to succeed him. And the next-strongest candidate also appears acceptable to the Kremlin.
But rather than sit out the election, Russia has redoubled its efforts to portray Ukraine as a hostile neighbor, lodging a barrage of complaints against its policies and plunging relations between the two countries to their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The vilification campaign has puzzled and alarmed analysts here as well as in Washington and Moscow. Many say Russia is trying to tilt the electoral field even further in its favor. But because that seems unnecessary, some are also asking whether Russian leaders might be laying the groundwork for a more serious confrontation with Ukraine, just a year after a brief war with another pro-Western neighbor, Georgia.
"Wars and conflicts begin with discussion of them as an option," said Valeriy Chaly, a foreign policy scholar at the Razumkov Center, a top research institute in Kiev. "Now, for the first time in years, the word 'war' is being used here, and it's not dismissed as impossible."
Eighteen years after the Soviet Union's collapse, Ukrainian independence still does not sit well with many Russians -- and a sizable minority in Ukraine -- who feel strongly about the country's cultural and historic ties to Russia. Relations have always been strained, but they became especially rocky after the Orange Revolution, when huge crowds protesting election fraud and autocratic rule rejected the Russian-backed presidential candidate and swept in a pro-Western government.
The democratic uprising worried Russia's own authoritarians, and Ukraine's subsequent push to join NATO alarmed them further. Recriminations between Moscow and Kiev became almost routine and culminated in a prolonged standoff over natural gas deliveries to Europe in the winter.
In recent weeks, though, Russian officials have ratcheted up the rhetoric, accusing Ukraine of sending troops to Georgia last year to kill Russian soldiers and of disrupting the operations of the Russian fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a letter last month that denounced his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yushchenko, and read like a brief for war.
The letter catalogued more than a dozen "anti-Russian" policies, including Ukraine's NATO bid, mistreatment of Russian investors, limits on the use of the Russian language, and efforts to promote a version of history that says the Soviet Union committed genocide against Ukrainians in the 1930s.
In a somber video released with the letter and staged with warships floating in the Black Sea behind him, Medvedev said he would refrain from sending a new ambassador to Ukraine, adding that tensions between the two countries had "hit unprecedented levels."
"Basically, we've entered a cold war," said Oleksandr Tretiakov, a parliamentary leader in Yushchenko's party who argues that Russia is trying to use its economic clout and control of the media to portray Ukraine as a "failed state" and unravel the Orange Revolution, which Moscow describes as a U.S.-engineered coup.
Some say the Kremlin is trying to distract its population from problems at home; polls show that Russians have more negative attitudes toward Ukraine than they do even toward the United States. But the message has resonated with many in Ukraine who are nostalgic for the Soviet era. Ukraine's 46 million people include 8 million ethnic Russians concentrated in the east and south.
A friendly government in Ukraine is a strategic priority for Russia. Ukrainian pipelines carry Russian gas to Europe, and the Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol under a deal that expires in 2017. But there is also an emotional bond, because both Russians and Ukrainians trace their history to a medieval kingdom that was centered in Kiev.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once argued to President George W. Bush that Ukraine wasn't a real country, and speaking to reporters in late May, he read approvingly from the diaries of an imperial general who referred to Ukraine as "Little Russia."
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the Kremlin cannot imagine Russia as a great power without Ukraine. The debate among policymakers, he said, is between moderates who want to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and ensure that it continues delivering Russian gas, and officials calling for a proactive strategy aimed at "soft dominance" over the country.
"Recently, it's moving toward the more proactive position," he said.
Both Putin and Medvedev have a personal stake in reversing the Orange Revolution, which was seen in Moscow as a humiliating defeat. Putin, when he was president, recognized the losing candidate as the winner of the election, while Medvedev, then Putin's chief of staff, supervised the heavy-handed campaign effort that backfired.
Mikhailo Pohrebinski, a political consultant who advised Ukraine's former president and often worked with Medvedev, said Russia's president appears to be building a case that Ukraine is violating its 1997 friendship treaty with Russia -- the only agreement in which Moscow has recognized Ukraine's borders.
The escalation of tensions comes at a difficult time for Ukraine, which has been hit hard by the global economic crisis and is struggling to enact painful reforms required for billions of dollars in emergency loans. With the January presidential election approaching, the nation's fractious leadership is even more divided and distracted than usual.
Russia has not endorsed a candidate, as it did five years ago when it backed the then-prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, who is now leader of Ukraine's largest opposition party and has made progress shaking his old image as a corrupt autocrat.
Though he may still be Moscow's favorite candidate, and is the front-runner in the race, Russia seems to be spreading its bets this time. Only Yushchenko has been attacked by name by Russian media, and he has proven such an unpopular and ineffective leader that he has little chance of winning reelection anyway.
Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, said the Kremlin is trying to force itself onto the campaign agenda and hold a "casting call" in which the candidates must clarify their positions on the issues Russia cares about.
But all of the major candidates, including Yanukovych, favor further integration with Europe, and none is likely to make as many concessions as Russia demands once in office, he said. As a result, the Kremlin is trying to increase its leverage over them now, while also preparing for a confrontation if that fails.
Yanukovych's strongest opponent in the race is Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the Orange Revolution and former ally of Yushchenko's who says she will improve relations with Russia without sacrificing Ukraine's independence.
Tymoshenko won praise from Putin after negotiating a deal with him to end the standoff that cut fuel supplies to much of Europe last winter. But she committed Ukraine to buy a fixed amount of gas in the contract, and now, with demand down in the recession, she is trying to renegotiate.
She and Putin emerged from a meeting last month saying Russia had agreed in principle to give Ukraine a break. But critics say Tymoshenko has left herself open to be blackmailed by the Kremlin, perhaps just before the election. For example, Russia has objected to a deal that Tymoshenko signed with the European Union to help modernize and reform Ukraine's gas sector.
Julia Mostovaya, deputy editor of Kiev's most independent newspaper, Zerkalo Nedeli, said Yushchenko's failure to pursue further democratic reforms after the Orange Revolution has left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian influence.
"It's a very dangerous situation now," she said. "We have two leading candidates without principles, and Russia has leverage to influence both."
What is Obama's real plan for Afghanistan? Surely he sees all the signs of quagmire that we do. So why is this happening?
The key to Obama is that he often assumbles what he considers "best practices" into new packages he then tries to promote. The other key is that like any President, he wants to avoid the appearance of losing, even if escalating doesn't assure winning. So here is what he is doing:
[1] Repeating the 2007 Iraq surge strategy of Gen. Petraeus. This was designed for political reasons, to lessen the Iraq violence in order to suppress the Iraq issue as the defining one in the presidential elections. As Petraeus said at the time, he wanted to speed up the Iraq clock to slow down the American one. Anti-war critics were caught off balance. The surge "worked" in ways that were under-reported. First, nearly 100,000 Sunni insurgents were put on the American payroll if they agreed not to shoot American troops. Second, the same McChrystal who now commands Afghanistan was in charge of a massive top-secret extra-judicial killing operation that devastated the remaining insurgents and gave a leading US operative "orgasms" [details in Bob Woodward's last book].
[2] Repeating Richard Holbrooke's diplomatic role in the Balkans where he presided over the complicated Dayton all-party talks on Bosnia, which cobbled together a fragile peace of sorts for the next decade. Holbrooke even negotiated with Slobodon Milosovic over pear brandy and in hunting lodges while the US military campaign was tightening against the Serbian leader. Holbrooke has been managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and a director of Lehman Bros. and AIG. He is a symbol of so-called "soft power." As Obama's special ambassador to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has assembled a large team of diplomatic, political, commercial and agricultural advisers who serve as a shadow neo-colonial state ready to assume responsibility for a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan. He famously said last month that it was impossible to define "success" in Afghanistan "but we'll know it when we see it."
In summary, the Obama plan is to use escalating military force to weaken - but probably not defeat - the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely based among Pashtun tribes. According to the plan, the next 12-18 months are the "critical window" for "demonstrating measurable progress" in disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda "and its allies" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the escalation kills and wounds greater numbers of Taliban, the violence will be described as declining, and Holbrooke's soft-power infrastructure will take over the role of nation-building, including standing up a newly-trained police force and army of hundreds of thousands of Afghans. In this plan, US casualties then will decline after the first 18-24 months and a phased withdrawal can proceed, ending in five, ten or 12 years.
The latest version of the plan is contained in the August 10 Pentagon "sensitive but unclassified" report, "United States Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan", by generals Karl Eikenberry [chief of mission in Kabul] and Stanley McChrystal, US commander. Their document is laced throughout with references to "civ-mil" strategies and "civ-mil" units, as if to emphasize the seamless connections between hard power and soft.
Perhaps it is a tribute to American and global public opinion, but the military strategy lacks any bloodthirsty references to combat, instead describing goals in sanitized language such as this: "International security forces [aka US troops] in partnership with Afghan security forces reverse security trends especially in Helmand, Kandahar, Khost Paktya and Paktika, facilitating GIRoA [Kabul government] presence at sub-national level."[p.17] the only slip came last week when the generals openly talked of using more "trigger pullers" on the ground and outsourcing more non-combat duties.
Have no doubt, they will kill a lot of Afghans and Pakistanis without press releases. Given unlimited time, troops and funding, it is possible that the US strategy can succeed in suppressing a restless Afghanistan/tribal Pakistan, though at the expense of numerous other American priorities. But with a majority of Americans and 70 percent of Democrats opposed to the war and occupation, with similar anti-war majorities rising in NATO countries, the question is whether the Obama strategy can appear to "succeed" in the short run.
The brief answer is no.
First, the current military surge is resulting in higher American troops losses than at any time since the beginning of the war. At the July-August 2009 rate, another 1,100 American troops will die by the end of 2011, on top of some 700 who were killed on Bush's watch. The American death toll inevitably has to rise before it ever begins to subside, if it even does by the end of Obama's first term. The dispatch of more American troops will increase the American casualty rates in the short term, stirring more questions from the public and Congress.
Similarly, the civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan and Pakistan will still increase in an escalated war, inflaming public opinion, even if the Pentagon's tighter guidelines are actually followed. The latest controversy over air strikes called by German forces shows the impossibility of truly "surgical" strikes, pits most Afghans against the foreign forces, and is having an unsettling effect on the Merkel coalition.
Second, unlike Iraq or the Balkans, the longer the foreign occupation, the more the Afghanistan client state weakens. The same is proving true in Pakistan, where the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas [FATA] and Baluchistan [homeland of Pakistan's Pashtun] show signs of breaking from the grip of the centralized state. The most immediate crisis is the discrediting of the Afghan government in the presidential election on which the entire American strategy depends. The civ-mil strategy paper sets a near-term goal of a "capable, accountable and effective government" in Afghanistan, and states that the "most important component [of the plan]", according to the document, "is a strong partnership with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]." But the US government was unable either to [1] fix the recent elections to benefit its client in Kabul, or [2] unable to prevent its own client from engaging in the most blatant of vote-rigging tactics.
We should not be surprised at this catastrophe. The same US government ignored, or was ignorant of, the "Lord of the Flies" behavior rampant among the private security contractors in charge of security at the American embassy in Kabul.
Now the US has dwindling choices. Ahmad Karzhai and his main opponent, Abdullah, are made of the same cloth. Any foreign plan to impose another leadership is sure to be rejected. The entire US plan to combine military and civilian tracks is derailed.
Whoever was responsible for this failed US strategy, from Karzhai to his American consultants at the highest levels, should be forced to resign. President Obama should retreat with his most trusted advisers to his most secluded study to ask who led him to this place, and quietly plan to slip out of the untenable position he is in. When President Kennedy realized that he could not trust his advisers during the Cuban missile crisis, he turned to his brother Bobby to open a second, secret track. Obama needs a Bobby.
The Democratic-led Congress, which is hardly known for a consistent anti-war stance, may be better able to see the quagmire in the making, and begin hearings on an exit strategy if only to avoid political consequences to their self-interests down the road.
The indispensible factor- never consulted by the experts but never ignored by the consultants- is the 70 percent of Democratic voters who, having no stakes in a failed enterprise, are the difference between winning and losing for the Congress and administration in 2010 and 2012. The public is the only force capable of making Congress step back from the brink.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, September 14, 2009
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The letter, neatly folded and placed under the front door, was addressed to Nisar Ahmad's father, a gray-bearded schoolteacher who could not have been prouder that his son had graduated from Kandahar University and had secured a well-paying job as a field assistant here for the U.N. Development Program.
This is the last warning. Keep your son away from this work. . . .
We know your son is working for infidels. If something happens to him, do not complain.
Two hours later, after he and his father discussed their options and concluded that they had no faith in the local police to protect them, Ahmad called the United Nations and resigned.
That private moment of fear handed yet another small victory to the Taliban in its campaign to reclaim Kandahar, the religious extremist movement's spiritual home and a key battleground for control of Afghanistan nearly eight years after the U.S.-led military campaign began.
The slow and quiet fall of Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, poses a complex new challenge for the NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan. It is factoring prominently into discussions between Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the overall U.S. and NATO commander, and his advisers about how many more troops to seek from Washington.
"Kandahar is at the top of the list," one senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said. "We simply do not have enough resources to address the challenges there."
Kandahar in many ways is a microcosm of the challenges the United States faces in stabilizing Afghanistan. The city is filled with ineffective government officials and police officers whom the governor calls looters and kidnappers. Unemployment is rampant. Municipal services are nonexistent. Reconstruction projects have not changed many lives. A lack of NATO forces allowed militants free rein.
But it is also unique. It is bigger and more complicated than any other place in southern Afghanistan -- and there is a growing belief among military commanders that it is more important to the overall counterinsurgency campaign than any other part of the country.
"Kandahar means Afghanistan," said the governor, Tooryalai Wesa. "The history of Afghanistan, the politics of Afghanistan, was always determined from Kandahar, and once again, it will be determined from Kandahar."
Increasing the Troop Level
For years, NATO's strategy had been to entrust corrupt and incompetent local police with principal responsibility for securing the dusty collection of neighborhoods here that are home to an estimated 800,000 people. But several senior officers and strategists now think that this approach no longer makes sense and that more troops are necessary to prevent the Taliban from further reclaiming the pivotal city.
McChrystal will probably present the Pentagon with a range of options in the next week or two that will outline the hoped-for gains if additional troops are deployed, according to people familiar with the discussions. The ultimate decision rests with President Obama, who must determine whether McChrystal's plan to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency effort across the country, one that aims to arrest the loss of places such as Kandahar to the Taliban, merits sending more U.S. forces.
Just how many forces are needed in this city, and what they would do, has become a matter of debate at the highest levels of the NATO military command in Kabul. There is near unanimity that more Afghan soldiers are needed in Kandahar. But there are no spare units to be deployed, and with violence increasing in the country's previously stable north and west, commanders are reluctant to pull troops from those areas.
As a consequence, some officers maintain that NATO forces need to move into parts of the city. Other military officials in Afghanistan, including top leaders of the regional headquarters that encompasses Kandahar, contend that sending more foreign troops into the city would only pull in more Taliban fighters from rural areas, drawing NATO forces into perilous urban combat. But even they acknowledge there is a need for more Special Forces soldiers and military police who can mentor the local police force, as well as possibly more NATO troops on the city's outskirts.
Residents say the level of Taliban activity in Kandahar can be deceiving to outsiders because the fighters' tactics are different here. Roadside bombs and suicide attacks are not the most commonly used weapons, largely because of the relative lack of foreign troops. Instead, it is paper and ink -- and the assassin's bullet when the recipient of a warning letter does not comply.
Taliban fighters have opted not to drive around in their trademark white pickup trucks, clad in black turbans. For now, they operate under the cover of darkness, prosecuting their intimidation campaign with correspondence and traffic checkpoints aimed at making it clear to residents that they are everywhere. Some NATO officials think the insurgents are trying to so weaken the government, security forces and relief agencies that they can one day assert full control over a city they are already dominating.
"Nobody in this city feels safe," said Ahmad, who now spends his days at home. "The Taliban do not show their faces during the day, but everyone knows they are in charge."
The Taliban Reemerges
To the U.S. government, and to many people here, the last Taliban holdouts in Kandahar appeared defeated by December 2001. Some fled across the desert to Pakistan. Others melted into the local population.
After a few months of intensive Special Forces operations to apprehend al-Qaeda members, the U.S. military largely ignored Kandahar. Afghan President Hamid Karzai soon installed an iron-fisted tribal ally as governor. Convinced that he would maintain order, the United States scaled back troop levels.
By 2005, as Taliban attacks were increasing in eastern Afghanistan, the United States ceded responsibility for security in Kandahar province to Canada, which sent about 2,500 troops to the area. Although Canada has allowed its forces to operate without some rules that have limited the activities of other NATO members, Canadian commanders acknowledge that they did not have enough soldiers on the ground while Taliban activity increased over the past three years.
When Canadian troops conducted repeated missions to clear militants from areas around the city, there never were enough forces to stay to keep insurgents from returning. Canada did not have the resources to maintain a large presence in the city: That was left to the local police.
Mistrusting the Police
It is the corruption of the police -- and that alleged of senior government officials -- that many Kandaharis say has been the principal reason for the Taliban's resurgence. Just as they did in the 1990s, residents say the Taliban is appealing not to a popular desire for religious fanaticism but to a demand for good governance. Part of the problem is that the police are ill-trained and ill-paid, driving them to graft. Another contributor: local leaders who have created a culture of impunity.
Chief among them, several Afghans contend, is the chairman of the Kandahar province council, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's younger brother. He is alleged to have links to the opium trade -- a charge he has denied -- and is accused of other misdeeds, including engaging in ballot-box fraud in support of his brother in the Aug. 20 presidential election.
Several U.S. lawmakers, including Vice President Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have urged the president to dismiss his brother from the council. But U.S. and Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several officials familiar with the issue.
At 10 p.m. on a recent evening, two dozen Canadian soldiers rumbled out of their base on the city's eastern fringe in a convoy of armored vehicles. Their mission was the same as it is most days: Head to the police headquarters, link up with a squad of municipal policemen and go on patrol. The goal is to get the police out of their stations and into the community, to convince Kandaharis that somebody is protecting them.
Only five bothered to report for duty. In one green pickup truck.
When the Canadians stopped to talk to a man guarding a row of closed market stalls in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, the policemen stayed in their truck.
"It's better when you are with the police," the guard, Agha Mohammed, told the Canadians. "If you are not here, the only time we see them is when they want bribes."
Earlier that day, Agha said, the police were at the market. They helped themselves to enough watermelons to fill the back of their pickup, he said.
Are there Taliban around here? one Canadian asked.
"They're here all the time," Agha said. "Sometimes they set up checkpoints at night."
But, he said, "they never ask us for money."
Fixing Kandahar
Shortly after he took over as the overall U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal asked his subordinates why more than half of the 21,000 troops deployed this spring were sent to neighboring Helmand province instead of Kandahar. The implication was clear, according to a person familiar with the discussion: Kandahar requires more forces.
By then, however, it was too late to move the Marines from Helmand. For now, NATO will have to try to fix Kandahar -- not just the city but the entire province, which is the country's second-largest in land area -- with the Canadians and five U.S. Army battalions, four of which are part of the new forces sent by Obama. The overall troop deployment is far less than what NATO has in Helmand, which has fewer residents.
That has forced commanders to address the Kandahar problem indirectly. Instead of sending troops into the city, the military's initial approach is to deploy most battalions in districts around Kandahar. The goal is to target insurgent redoubts in those areas and cut off infiltration routes into the city.
Those operations are just beginning. In Arghandab, a Taliban stronghold to the north, two U.S. Army infantry battalions equipped with Stryker armored vehicles have spent the past three weeks trying to flush out insurgents from villages surrounded by lush pomegranate orchards and grapevines. It is perilous work: The soldiers have encountered scores of booby traps and roadside bombs, and they have suffered more casualties in the those weeks than any other U.S. units in Afghanistan.
NATO officials regard only one of the districts around the city as reasonably stable, and that is because Canadian commanders concentrated the bulk of their forces in the area over the past six months. They also poured money into development projects, with the aim of getting residents to band against the Taliban.
The effort in Dand district has shown promising signs, in part because of what some Canadian development specialists regard as a mistake: The district chief hired his brother to administer a Canadian-funded public works project aimed at generating employment, and the brother gave most of the jobs to fellow members of his Barakzai tribe. That nepotism, however, wound up encouraging Barakzai elders in Dand to write a letter to the local Taliban commander telling him to "stay away," according to Canadian officials. Young tribesmen also have mounted informal security patrols in the area.
But what occurred in Dand may be hard to pull off elsewhere, Canadians note, because that district has fewer tribal rivalries and is relatively small, resulting in a much higher concentration of NATO troops to residents than will be possible in other places. And thus far, NATO officials have been reluctant to embrace tribal solutions to combating the insurgency out of fear that will create a new class of warlords.
Even if counterinsurgency operations in the surrounding districts are successful, some military officials at NATO headquarters in Kabul remain skeptical that the strategy will improve security inside Kandahar. They warn that the new push on the fringe will simply push militants inside the city.
"We could wind up with the exact opposite effect than we're seeking to achieve," one official said.
But, the official noted: "Unless we get more troops, we don't really have a choice. We can't go into the city with the forces we have now."
One of the oddest — indeed, surreal — encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The question: How can Washington avoid the kind of defeat it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago?
Karnow did not divulge what he said to the two men, but he toldAssociated Press that the "lesson" of Vietnam "was that we shouldn't have been there," and that, while "Obama and everybody else seems to want to be in Afghanistan," he, Karnow, was opposed to the war.
It is hardly surprising that Washington should see parallels to the Vietnam debacle. The enemy is elusive enemy. The local population is neutral, if not hostile. And the governing regime is corrupt with virtually no support outside of the nation's capital.
But in many ways Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam. So, it is increasingly hard to fathom why a seemingly intelligent American administration seems determined to hitch itself to this disaster in the making. It is almost as if there is something about that hard-edged Central Asian country that deranges its occupiers.
Delusion #1
In his address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Obama characterized Afghanistan as "a war of necessity" against international terrorism. But the reality is that the Taliban is a polyglot collection of conflicting political currents whose goals are local, not universal jihad.
Taliban spokesman Yousef Ahmadi told Gopal, "We are fighting to free our country from foreign domination," adding, "Even the Americans once waged an insurgency to free their country."
Besides the Taliban, there are at least two other insurgent groups. Hizb-I-Islam is led by former U.S. ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyer. The Haqqani group, meanwhile, has close ties to al-Qaeda.
The White House's rationale of "international terrorism" parallels the Southeast Asian tragedy. The U.S. characterized Vietnam as part of an international Communist conspiracy, while the conflict was essentially a homegrown war of national liberation.
Delusion #2
One casualty of Vietnam was the doctrine of counterinsurgency, the theory that an asymmetrical war against guerrillas can be won by capturing the "hearts and minds" of the people. Of course "hearts and minds" was a pipe dream, obliterated by massive civilian casualties, the widespread use of defoliants, and the creation of "strategic hamlets" that had more in common with concentration camps than villages.
In Vietnam's aftermath, "counterinsurgency" fell out of favor, to be replaced by the "Powell Doctrine" of relying on massive firepower to win wars. With that strategy the United States crushed the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War. Even though the doctrine was downsized for the invasion of Iraq a decade later, it was still at the heart of the attack.
However, within weeks of taking Baghdad, U.S. soldiers were besieged by an insurgency that wasn't in the lesson plan. Ambushes and roadside bombs took a steady toll on U.S. and British troops, and aggressive countermeasures predictably turned the population against the occupation.
After four years of getting hammered by insurgents, the Pentagon rediscovered counterinsurgency, and its prophet was General David Petraeus, now commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. "Hearts and minds" was dusted off, and the watchwords became "clear, hold, and build." Troops were to hang out with the locals, dig wells, construct schools, and measure success not by body counts of the enemy, but by the "security" of the civilian population.
This theory impelled the Obama administration to "surge" 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and to consider adding another 20,000 in the near future. The idea is that a surge will reduce the violence, as a similar surge of 30,000 troops had done in Iraq.
Delusion #3
But as Patrick Cockburn of The Independentdiscovered, the surge didn't work in Iraq.
With the possible exception of Baghdad, it wasn't U.S. troops that reduced the violence in Iraq, but the decision by Sunni insurgents that they could no longer fight a two-front war against the Iraqi government and the United States. The ceasefire by Shi'ite cleric and Madhi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr also helped calm things down. In any case, as recent events have demonstrated, the "peace" was largely illusory.
Not only is a similar "surge" in Afghanistan unlikely to be successful, the formula behind counterinsurgency doctrine predicts that the Obama administration is headed for a train wreck.
According to investigative journalist Jordan Michael Smith, the "U.S/ Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual" — co-authored by Petraeus — recommends "a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents. In Afghanistan, with its population estimated at 33 million, that would mean at least 660,000 troops." And this requires not just any soldiers, but soldiers trained in counterinsurgency doctrine.
The numbers don't add up.
The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies currently have about 64,000 troops in Afghanistan, and that figure would rise to almost 100,000 when the present surge is completed. Some 68,000 of those will be American. There is also a possibility that Obama will add another 20,000, bringing the total to 120,000, larger than the Soviet Army that occupied Afghanistan. That's still only a fifth of what the counterinsurgency manual recommends.
Meanwhile, the American public is increasingly disillusioned with the war. According to a recent CNN poll, 57% of Americans oppose the war, a jump of 9% since May. Among Obama supporters the opposition is overwhelming: Nearly two-thirds of "committed" Democrats feel "strongly" the war is not worth fighting.
Delusion #4
Afghanistan isn't like Iraq because NATO is behind us. Way behind us.
The British — whose troops actually fight, as opposed to doing "reconstruction" like most of the other 16 NATO nations — have lost the home crowd. Polls show deep opposition to the war, a sentiment that is echoed all over Europe. Indeed, the German Defense Minister Franz-Joseph Jung has yet to use the word "war" in relation to Afghanistan.
That little piece of fiction went a-glimmering in June, when three Bundeswehr soldiers were killed near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Indeed, as U.S. Marines go on the offensive in the country's south, the Taliban are pulling up stakes and moving east and north to target the Germans. The tactic is as old as guerrilla warfare: "Where the enemy is strong, disperse. Where the enemy is weak, concentrate."
While Berlin's current ruling coalition of Social Democrats and conservatives quietly back the war, the Free Democrats — who are likely to join Chancellor Angela Merkel's government after the next election — are calling for bringing Germany's 4,500 troops home.
The opposition Left Party has long opposed the war, and that opposition gave it a boost in recent state elections.
The United States and NATO can't — or won't — supply the necessary troops, and the Afghan army is small, corrupt and incompetent. No matter how one adds up the numbers, the task is impossible. So why is the administration following an unsupportable course of action?
Why We Fight
There is that oil pipeline from the Caspian that no one wants to talk about. Strategic control of energy is certainly a major factor in Central Asia. Then, too, there is the fear that a defeat for NATO in its first "out of area" war might fatally damage the alliance.
But when all is said and done, there also seems to be is a certain studied derangement about the whole matter, a derangement that was on display July 12 when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament that the war was showing "signs of success."
British forces had just suffered 15 deaths in a little more than a week, eight of them in a 24-hour period. It has now lost more soldiers that it did in Iraq. This is Britain's fourth war in Afghanistan.
The Karzai government has stolen the election. The war has spilled over to help destabilize and impoverish nuclear-armed Pakistan. The American and European public is increasingly opposed to the war. July was the deadliest month ever for the United States, and the Obama administration is looking at a $9 trillion deficit.
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