International Relations

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The Afghanistan War Logs

Someone has leaked six years worth of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan through a website called WikiLeaks.org. 

White House spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, and National Security Advisor, James Jones, have both condemned the leaks.  The White House is also using them to explain why the President ordered the increase in troops. But what do they really show?  The Afghanistan War Logs show that there are probably a lot more civilian casualties than we thought; the insurgents have weapons that can shoot down our military aircraft; and there is a lot of corruption by warlords and government in Afghanistan.   There is also information that at least part of the government of Pakistan has been aiding the Taliban.  Is any of this really new?  Has anything changed since December?  I think the answer to both questions is “no.”

The most interesting information to emerge is from the Guardian.

The shadow of Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, hangs heavily over the US-led coalition’s campaign in Afghanistan. Again and again, the secret watchers of American military intelligence, whose furtive and often confused attempts at information gathering are collated in the 2004-2009 war logs, glimpse the hidden hand of the al-Qaida chief or catch a tantalising whiff of his whereabouts, only for the trail to turn cold and peter out.

…

Reportedly a high-level meeting was held in Quetta, Pakistan, where six suicide bombers were given orders for an operation in northern Afghanistan. Two persons have been given targets in Kunduz, two in Mazar-e-Sharif and the last two are said to come to Faryab,” the report claimed.It went on: “These meetings take place once every month, and there are usually about 20 people present. The place for the meeting alternates between Quetta and villages (NFDG) [no further details given] on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The top four people in these meetings are Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader], Osama bin Laden, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah [Baradar]. “The six foreigners who have been given the assignment have each been given $50,000 [£32,000] to conduct the attacks, and they have been promised that their families will be taken care of.”

So are we really fighting in Afghanistan and trying to navigate a very complicated cultural and political situation because George W. Bush lost interest in pursuring bin Laden?  We now seem to be the outsiders trying to impose a solution instead of fighting terrorism.  I keep waiting for someone to talk about winning hearts and minds like in Vietnam.  Reports are that many Afghani’s don’t like either President Karzai or the American troops.

John Nichols writes in the Nation

The echo you are hearing is that of the Nixon administration responding to the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Indeed, as Dan Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers says: “I’m very impressed by the release. It is the first release in 39 years or 40 years, since I first gave the Pentagon papers to the Senate, of the scale of the Pentagon papers.”

 We can only hope that Obama and his aides have read enough history to recognize that Nixon’s over-reaction to the Pentagon Papers began a process that would lead — at least in part — to a House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach him and the only presidential resignation in the country’s history.

I’ve always thought that the President’s strategy was to increase the troops, tough it out until 2011, and then start leaving.  I hope that these revelations push him harder in that direction.

And I am very proud of the reaction of Senator John Kerry.  John Nichols again

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, did a whole lot better than the administration.

 “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Kerry, whose discomfort with the Afghanistan operation has grown increasingly evident. “Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

 Kerry should hold hearings with regard to the Afghanistan War Logs.

As a bonus, here is a short history of the War in Afghanistan from the New York Times.

The Conflict in Afghanistan

  • 1979 The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Mujahedeen — Islamic fighters — from across the globe, including Osama bin Laden, come to fight Soviet forces.
  • 1989 Last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan.
  • 1996 The Taliban take control of Afghanistan, imposing fundamentalist Islamic law. Osama bin Laden takes refuge in the country.
  • Sept. 2001 After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush gives the Taliban an ultimatum to hand over bin Laden; the Taliban refuse, and in October the U.S. leads a campaign that drives the Taliban out of major Afghan cities by the end of the year.
  • 2002 Hamid Karzai becomes interim president of Afghanistan. The Taliban continue to wage guerrilla warfare near the border with Pakistan.
  • 2004 New constitution is ratified, making Afghanistan an Islamic state with a strong president. Later, Mr. Karzai wins the country’s first presidential election.
  • Feb. 2009 President Obama orders 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
  • Aug. 2009 President Karzai wins re-election in a vote marred by fraud.
  • Dec. 2009 President Obama issues orders to send 30,000 troops in 2010, bringing the total American force to about 100,000.
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    Queen Elizabeth at the United Nations

    On July 6, Queen Elizabeth addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations for eight minutes.  The speech received little of no attention and I wouldn’t even have known about it until I read the most recent Newsweek and Jon Meacham’s very interesting thoughts on the speech.

    Queen Elizabeth

    First from the New York Times

    Queen Elizabeth II addressed the United Nations for the first time since 1957 on Tuesday, paying homage to the organization’s accomplishments since she last stood at the famous green podium of the General Assembly.

    …

    It was a brief speech (see text), just eight minutes, assuring that  the queen’s remarks would not join the annals of infamous harangues from the podium delivered by long-reigning leaders like Muammar al-Qaddafi, who spoke for more than 90 minutes last fall, or Fidel Castro of Cuba. It was the first of three public visits during the queen’s daylong stop in New York City.

    On her first visit, just four years after she took the throne, the queen came gliding into the United Nations in a black slip dress (or at least it looked black in the rapturous newsreels about the visit), high heels and a fur wrap. There was definitely no need for the fur wrap in the suffocating July heat on Tuesday — the queen wore a flowered suit and a curvy, elegant hat.

    If the monarch, now 84, did not exactly sweep through the hall with the same grace as her 31-year-old self, the United Nations building itself looked rather more tattered, only now undergoing its first renovations since it was built around 1950.

    So what did Jon Meacham make of the speech?

    Given her audience and the constitutional restraints on her role—the personification of political life, she must be above politics—Elizabeth’s brief address could be read as an exercise in ceremonial conventionality. Yet her little-noted remarks offer a meditation on globalism and post-imperialism from a woman whose ancestors ruled much of the world. For American conservatives who worry that President Obama (or, really, any Democratic president) veers dangerously close to “one worldism,” the queen’s speech in New York serves as an inadvertent endorsement of a habit of mind in which power, both military and economic, is best exercised cooperatively rather than coercively. Saluting the U.N.’s diplomatic and relief work, she specifically cited the challenges of terrorism and climate change; the latter is of special concern, she said, for a “careful account must be taken of the risks facing smaller, more vulnerable countries, many of them from the Commonwealth.”

    Meacham continues

    What she takes very seriously—and I use that “very” advisedly—is the British Commonwealth, the loose association of 54 countries of which she is the titular head. There is no single superpower in her realm; she came to the throne in 1952 in the aftermath of World War II, a conflict in which the U.K. saved freedom but lost an empire. She has spent the last half century offering the Commonwealth a kind of subtle but steady rhetorical leadership—not unlike that provided by the U.N.

    In a world of asymmetrical threats—terror, nuclear proliferation, disease, poverty, and climate change—multilateralism is not, to borrow an image from Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, a policy of choice but of necessity. This does not mean America ought to go limp. Quite the opposite, in fact: the projection of our strength is magnified when we project it in concert with allies, whether through the U.N., NATO, or some provisional force created for a given military or policy purpose.

    Foreign-policy doctrines are, in my view, chiefly useful in retrospect, not in real time, for the making of policy is almost always provisional, subject to the forces and the exigencies of a given moment. Which is why if we have to go it alone, we will. We learned how from Elizabeth’s first prime minister, Winston Churchill. But those hours will prove the exception, not the rule.

    The rule is a world like Elizabeth’s Commonwealth. And the work endures. Quoting the late U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, the queen said, “ ‘Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.’ Good nurses get better with practice; sadly, the supply of patients never ceases.”

    This quote from Queen Elizabeth sums up what she believes and what I think Barack Obama’s view of diplomacy comes close to

    It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.  I know of no single formula for success, but over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal, and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration, to work together.

    I have to think that the conservative, George W. Bush/Dick Cheney/Tea Party view of the world where the United States is the ultimate power and can just tell other countries what is going to happen is rapidly becoming outdated.  The world is becoming a large democracy with everyone needing to have a say.  We need to listen to the Queen and work together.

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    Nuclear Security

    I grew up going to protests and vigils to urge President Kennedy to ban open air testing so I am thrilled that President Obama has taken the first steps to get the world talking about securing bomb-making materials from terrorists and other rogues.  And if you click this link, you will see him “dance” as he greets all the leaders.  Watch it full screen.

    The New York Times reports

    The meeting that Mr. Obama convened, and to a great degree stage-managed, was unlike any negotiations over arms control with the Soviets during the cold war or, more recently, the so-far fruitless talks to get North Korea to disarm. This was a far broader effort to persuade African, Latin American, Asian and European nations to agree on steps to deny terrorist groups the two materials necessary to make a bomb: plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

    Mr. Obama began the session arguing that while superpower confrontation was far more remote, the risk of nuclear terrorism had never been greater, and he quoted the warning of Albert Einstein soon after the beginning of the nuclear age: “We are drifting towards a catastrophe beyond comparison.”

    …

    Critics contended that this session was all for show.

    “The summit’s purported accomplishment is a nonbinding communiqué that largely restates current policy, and makes no meaningful progress in dealing with nuclear terrorism threats or the ticking clock represented by Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” said Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who has vowed to oppose nuclear treaties Mr. Obama regards as essential.

    Mr. Obama acknowledged that the commitments were voluntary, but he said the situation was nothing new. “If you are asking, ‘Do we have an international, one-world law enforcement,’ we don’t, and we never have,” he said.

    Isn’t getting someone to do something voluntarily better than forcing them to do it? 

    At the end of two days of meetings, Mr. Obama could claim two major accomplishments: The summit meeting forced countries that had failed to clean up their nuclear surpluses to formulate detailed plans to deal with them, and it kicked into action nations that had failed to move on previous commitments.

    A second summit meeting will be held in two years in South Korea, Mr. Obama said, to make sure countries are on track.

    Some countries arrived with what Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s nuclear adviser, called “house gifts” that the United States had encouraged as signs of sincerity. For example, Canada, Mexico and Ukraine committed to eliminating their surplus weapons-grade materials or giving them to the United States.

    This week, Russia closed a plutonium reactor it had used to make weapons-grade fuel. Other nations agreed to convert research reactors to fuel that could not be used for weapons.

     

    Outside experts were optimistic. Sam Nunn, the former senator who tutored Mr. Obama on proliferation issues, said he thought “we are now closer to cooperation than catastrophe.” Graham Allison, a Harvard expert on nuclear terrorism, made the case that if countries “lock down all nuclear weapons and bomb-usable material as securely as gold in Fort Knox, they can reduce the likelihood of a nuclear 9/11 to nearly zero.”

    As I said at the beginning, baby steps are better than taking no steps at all.  We have made a start.