Congress passed, and President Obama has signed into law, a four-year extension of some controversial non-permanent provisions in the PATRIOT Act including roving wiretaps (authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device ) of court-ordered searches of business records and of surveillance of non-American “lone wolf” suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups. Sen. Rand Paul held up the bill until he was given a vote on an amendment that would have restricted powers to obtain gun records in terrorist investigations. It was defeated 85-10 after lawmakers received a letter from the National Rifle Association stating that it was not taking a position on the measure.

After narrowly defeating a measure to attach a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the House of Representatives passed a $690 billion defense bill. President Obama has threatened to veto it over its languaging expanding the president’s war authority beyond going after those behind the 9/11 attacks, preventing any funds from being used to transfer detainees at Guantanamo Bay, undermining the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and reaffirming the Defense of Marriage Act. The bill also bars any U.S. ground forces from Libya, but the House is ignoring the Obama administration’s call for a vote on authorizing our current involvement there.

House Republicans also continued their anti-abortion crusade by banning health centers from using federal money to train doctors on how to perform abortions. But at least they finally made time for that jobs agenda.

At the same time, most Senate Republicans decided to follow their counterparts off a cliff by voting in favor of the Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system. Among the Republicans that voted against it were Sens. Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe who face reelection next year. This helps them both in the general, but Snowe in particular faces a tea party challenge and this adds fuels to the fire. Sen. Richard Lugar, also facing a uphill primary battle, voted in favor, hopefully giving Democrats an opening if he makes it out. Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul also voted against it, though in Paul’s case, it was because he didn’t think he went far enough. His own budget plan, along with Sen. Pat Toomey’s and the White House proposal, also failed.

And before leaving for Memorial weekend, Senate Republicans also set up a “pro forma” session to block President Obama from recess appointing Elizabeth Warren to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

With the sad passing of Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history, the Democrats for now number 58 in the Senate (the Democratic governor of West Virginia will appoint someone in the near future, with a special election taking place in 2012, the same time as the next election was going to be held anyway). As it is tradition that the President pro temp of the Senate goes to the most senior member of the majority party, Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii was sworn in.

Since the Democrats lost a member, they had to reconvene conference negotiations on the Wall Street reform bill, removing a bank tax (meaning costs of the bill will now fall back on the taxpayers) to appease Sen. Scott Brown who is still uncommital on his vote, which will now not take place until next week.  The House of Representatives passed the final version, with Speaker Pelosi personally gavelling the vote to a close, as it represents the biggest financial reforms since the Great Depression.

And extension of jobless benefits passed in the House but died once again in the Senate (thanks to Republicans and Sen. Ben Nelson), meaning that the unemployed will continue to suffer through the 4th of July congressional recess. The House also passed a bill that broadens BP’s legal liability for the 11 workers who died in the oil rig explosion.

Gen. David Petraeus was quickly confirmed 99-0 to command the war effort in Afghanistan, replacing Gen. Stanley McChrystal whom was removed by Pres. Obama after controversial remarks to Rolling Stone but will be retiring with four stars. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings this week were decidedly uncontroversial and she is expected to be confirmed.

First off, I’d like to apologize for the dearth of blogging on my part as of late. My personal circumstances have changed in a way that I’m happy with, but also in a way that leaves me considerably less time for blogging (and my considerably less time, I mean mostly no time at all.) Thankfully my co-bloggers Adam and Nat-Wu have kept us from being completely dead. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future I can work out an arrangement that allows me to get some blogging done on a more regular basis, if not quite back at a level I at least am accustomed to. On that note:

You may recall that late last year Wikileaks, an organization dedicated to revealing sensitive government and corporate secrets, published the text of over half a million text messages captured electronically in the day leading up to and the day of the 9/11 attacks. I thought the story was pretty extraordinary, but it didn’t grab much in the way of headlines and disappeared in pretty short order. For this and other revelations, Wikileaks has become a target of US counterintelligence, who deem it a threat to national security, mostly for revealing gross ineptitude and criminal behavior on the part of government officials. This newest revelation on the part of Wikileaks will probably cause them to want to redouble their efforts, as a secret military video decrypted by Wikileaks reveals that in 2007 US military forces killed Iraqi civilians in cold blood, including two Iraqi reporters for Reuters:

The video is accompanied by audio of the pilots’ radio dialogue…Reuters has been attempting to obtain the video under Freedom of Information Act requests since the incident occurred in July, 2007, but the Pentagon blocked all requests. Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger says the video is “graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result”. Wikileaks director Julian Assange said Wikileaks had to break military encryption on the file to view it, and will not reveal how or from whom the file was obtained. The transcript (and audio) seem to show the air crew lying about encountering a firefight. When they finish shooting, they laugh at the dead.

The NY Times reports that a “senior American military official” has confirmed the video as authentic. As might
be expected, the military essentially whitewashed the incident. The official report “stated that the Reuters employees ‘made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.’” I suppose the newsmen should’ve waved their badges in their air in the hopes that the trigger-happy helicopter pilots would see them.

Also, in another story reported by the NY Times, NATO and American military officials in Afghanistan have begun backtracking on their initial denials of special forces involvement in the deaths of Afghan civilians in a nighttime raid in February, including two pregnant women. The timing of latest statement is highly suspicious, given that on the same day as this about face, the Times of London printed a story detailing claims by Afghan investigators that US special forces tampered with evidence in an effort to hide their involvement in the killings. Those claims can’t be substantiated, but the fact that Afghan investigators were denied access to the scene of the killings for hours afterwards certainly doesn’t bolster NATO claims that the shootings were entirely accidental.

There really is no lesson to be drawn from these separate incidents except one: the cover-up is always worse than the crime. No one can expect that there will be no incidents of wanton murder or gross negligence or recklessness when heavily armed men go to war. What damages the credibility of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and places responsible members of our military in even further danger, is the effort by officials in the military (and in some instances, in civilian government) to cover up the atrocities that members of our military our bound to commit from time to time. Were senior military officials to punish these participants to whatever degree is deserved for their involvement in these killings, we could at the very least say that our military acts in accordance with the strictest code of honor and decency. Instead we must rely on the consciences of individuals who, despite the threat of punishment, feel that this information must be revealed to the world. At least their are such people, but why can’t we ask senior members of the military to act with half as much honor?

This Joe Klein piece is a doozy (via Glenn Greenwald):

Let’s start with a fact: the Indian Embassy in Kabul has suffered major, lethal bomb attacks twice in the past two years. There is little question in the intelligence community that these attacks were staged by terrorist allies of the Pakistani Army. The Pakistanis are absolutely convinced that if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, India will jump in, supporting the non-Pashtun elements in the country–indeed, India was a supporter of the Northern Alliance’s guerrilla war against the Taliban in the 1990s (although, it must be said, the Pakistanis have a rather exaggerated sense of Indian involvement).

Why is this a problem we should care about? Because India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons. Because tensions between the two countries would escalate dramatically if we were to abandon the region. And, most important, because our departure would empower the more radical elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services–not merely in their support of the Taliban, but also, potentially, in their ability to stage an Islamist coup d’etat. This is the worst scenario imaginable: a nuclear Pakistan, with allies of Osama Bin Laden controlling the trigger. (Nor would this be the first Islamist coup: Zia al-Haq staged one in the late 1970s, which we supported–against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.)

Far-fetched? Well, it’s certainly a worst case scenario–but it’s far more plausible than the domino theory that led us into Vietnam.

You see? Because we justified a bad war with a fanciful and unlikely dire outcome, why not justify another with one that is only slightly less so? Klein is arguing that we should stay in Afghanistan because India and Pakistan might nuke each other if we don’t, and because our leaving would empower Islamic radicals to topple the Pakistani government. First off, I don’t understand why anything Pakistan and India might want to do to each other with their nukes is our problem except in the broadest sense, and I don’t see why our soldiers getting killed in Afghanistan is the best way to go about handling the problem of nuclear war between Afghanistan and Pakistan anyway. Second, this bit about the Islamists taking over in Pakistan gets bandied about an awful lot, without anybody really bothering to explain or explore how likely this is. I’m betting that the likelihood of the Taliban ever taking over in Pakistan are extremely slim. The odds that they may attack a nuclear facility and steal a nuke are still long but more worrisome, and nothing can be done about that problem by hanging around in Afghanistan. At essence, the problem is that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons in the first place, but that horse has already long fled the barn, right?

There are plenty of good reasons to continue fighting in Afghanistan that are directly related to our own security and which aim to prevent real, likely threats to our security. Fashioning unlikely threats, or threats that are tangential to our interests, really isn’t necessary at this point.

At first these articles don’t seem to line up. The headline in the LA Times reads “Drone attacks may be expanded in Pakistan“, but Newsweek says Obama is firmly against any expansion of the attacks. Here’s an excerpt from the LA Times piece (via Kevin Drum):

Senior U.S. officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into a major city in an attempt to pressure the Pakistani government to pursue Taliban leaders based in Quetta.

The proposal has opened a contentious new front in the clandestine war. The prospect of Predator aircraft strikes in Quetta, a sprawling city, signals a new U.S. resolve to decapitate the Taliban. But it also risks rupturing Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.

The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option. Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta — or at least threatening to do so — is crucial to the success of the revised war strategy President Obama unveiled last week.

“If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious,” said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning. “What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.; we can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore.”

Let me tell you this: if we launch remote missile attacks into a densely populated urban area, a move which will almost certainly result in the deaths of God only knows how many civilians with each attack, Pakistan’s worst problem won’t be the Taliban. No, the real problem will be the millions of enraged Pakistanis, who will be justly infuriated by our callous disregard for civilian life and for Pakistani sovereignty. There won’t be any of this shrug and a “What can we do?” from the Pakistani government, members of whom will be similarly enraged by the attacks. It astonishes me that anyone thinks this is a good idea. Fortunately, Newsweek is reporting Obama is opposed to this move:

One person standing in the way of expanded missile strikes: President Obama. Five administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise. Obama is concerned that firing missiles into urban areas like Quetta, where intelligence reports suggest that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and other high-level militants have sometimes taken shelter, would greatly increase the risk of civilian casualties. It would also draw protests from Pakistani politicians and military leaders, who have been largely quiet about the drone attacks as long as they’ve been confined to the country’s out-of-sight border region. The White House has been encouraged by Pakistan’s own recent military efforts to root out militants along the Afghan border, and it does not want to jeopardize that cooperation.

The marginal security gains we would hope to make by  launching missile strikes into Quetta in the hopes of bagging high profile members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, is not worth the civilian dead, or the risk of rupturing our alliance with Pakistan. And this should be a reminder of the mindset that comes to afflict those that manage difficult and messy wars; desperate for success, they reach for every incremental gain in the war, heedless of the extreme drawbacks of their decisions. The end result of that course can only ever be a war lost, only at much greater damage to our standing than what we would suffer by limiting ourselves. We had better hope to God that Obama keeps a lid on these people.

I want to say unbelievable, but of course it’s completely believable:

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

By “participated in” they mean “conducted the raids with CIA personnel”:

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

[...]

Five former Blackwater employees and four current and former American intelligence officials interviewed for this article would speak only on condition of anonymity because Blackwater’s activities for the agency were secret and former employees feared repercussions from the company. The Blackwater employees said they participated in the raids or had direct knowledge of them.

Along with the former officials, they provided few details about the targets of the raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, although they said that many of the Iraq raids were directed against members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. To corroborate the claims of the company’s involvement, a former Blackwater security guard provided photographs to The Times that he said he took during the raids. They showed detainees and armed men whom he and a former company official identified as Blackwater employees. The former intelligence officials said that Blackwater’s work with the C.I.A. in Iraq and Afghanistan had grown out of its early contracts with the spy agency to provide security for the C.I.A. stations in both countries.

[...]

The former American intelligence officials said that Blackwater guards were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to C.I.A. officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents or other targets.

“They were supposed to be the outer layer of the onion, out on the perimeter,” said one former Blackwater official of the security guards. Instead, “they were the drivers and the gunslingers,” said one former intelligence official.

But in the chaos of the operations, the roles of Blackwater, C.I.A., and military personnel sometimes merged. Former C.I.A. officials said that Blackwater guards often appeared eager to get directly involved in the operations. Experts said that the C.I.A.’s use of contractors in clandestine operations falls into a legal gray area because of the vagueness of language laying out what tasks only government employees may perform.

P.W. Singer, an expert in contracting at the Brookings Institution, said that the types of jobs that have been outsourced in recent years make a mockery of regulations about “inherently governmental” functions.

“We keep finding functions that have been outsourced that common sense, let alone U.S. government policy, would argue should not have been handed over to a private company,” he said. “And yet we do it again, and again, and again.”

According to one former Blackwater manager, the company’s involvement with the C.I.A. raids was “widely known” by Blackwater executives. “It was virtually continuous, and hundreds of guys were involved, rotating in and out,” over a period of several years, the former Blackwater manager said.

One former Blackwater guard recalled a meeting in Baghdad in 2004 in which Erik Prince addressed a group of Blackwater guards working with the C.I.A. At the meeting in an air hangar used by Blackwater, the guard said, Mr. Prince encouraged the Blackwater personnel “to do whatever it takes” to help the C.I.A. with the intensifying insurgency, the former guard recalled.

And this:

“It became a very brotherly relationship,” said one former top C.I.A. officer. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

It’s really not hard to understand how any of this happened. The CIA used Blackwater contractors (the less sophisticated among us might refer to them as “mercenaries”) in the first place because of the expertise that many of these contractors have as former members of the military, and especially the special forces. Given the close ties that these contractors have with their former comrades, it’s no surprise that the lines would get a little blurry out in the field; after all the only difference is whose signing the check now, right? Well, not exactly. The reason it’s so problematic to use hired guns in the field is because their goals and limitations are not the same as even the notoriously unaccountable CIA “black ops” personnel. These contractors may feel like they’re doing their part for America, but they ain’t doing it without getting paid upwards of $100,000 a year, and they aren’t accountable for any of their actions. They don’t fear criminal liability, and if one of them fucks up and “accidentally” kills a detainee that they’ve captured, he’s merely whisked back to the States for a little vacation, or at worst fired so he can go to work for an even less reputable private security firm. And though they are professionals (in a sense) they are not bound by the rules of conduct that special forces who assist with CIA operations are. So basically what you end up with are cowboys running around on the battlefield who get paid more than the military personnel they’re serving alongside, who are bound by no code of conduct beyond what Blackwater chooses to selectively enforce, and whose goal above all else is to get paid.

This is how we run wars now? The Romans knew a thing or two about what happens when men will fight wars for you only when you pay them.

The NY Times has a pretty interesting look at the process by which Obama and his senior civilian and military advisors arrived at the planned escalation of troop strength in Afghanistan. If you want some idea of what the administration’s strategy is in Afghanistan, this is probably as close as you’re going to get. What it makes clear is that Obama remains as focused on getting troops out of Afghanistan as he is getting them in, despite having come around to accepting the urgency of the situation. Though the conditions for withdrawal are obviously quite vague, and the administration is determined to hedge their bets, it’s clear there is no open-ended commitment to Afghanistan. If anything, it appears the administration’s strategy is focused on buying time for the Karzai administration to bolster it’s forces, but that they are willing to buy only so much time for the Afghan government. The article gives you the strong impression that Obama decided on a maximum commitment that we can make to Afghanistan in terms of money and manpower, and developed a strategy to take advantage of what we’re willing to give as quickly as possible. Which sounds great if-like me-you’re someone who believes that however “necessary” the war in Afghanistan is, there is an absolute limit to the amount of money we can spend and the amount of casualties our military can endure. At the same time, it’s going to be awfully difficult politically for the Obama administration to start pulling those forces out if Afghanistan is mired in similar circumstances to the ones that it exist today, and it’s going to be awfully tempting to stretch those deployments beyond what was initially planned for. Given an inch of wiggle room in the withdrawal strategy, and it’s going to be hard not to take a mile, especially when there’s no appreciable Afghanistan “awakening” on the horizon.

Anyway, it’s a good read. Check it out.

Two different perspectives, both of which I think are reading. First, Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch, on the “inertia” of war:

If the fight in Afghanistan is really one of national necessity, then refusing to give the Karzai government a “blank check” and putting something like a timetable on withdrawal makes no sense. If the fight is truly necessary, then we must commit as many resources as it takes for as long as it takes to win. If it really isn’t, on the other hand, then why spend more blood and treasure? Saying that Afghanistan is a war of urgency and necessity, then qualifying our commitment to it, isn’t a coherent strategy. Stephen Walt guesses, and I think he’s right, that Obama’s decision has as much to do with domestic politics as it does with the broader strategic situation. To test that, do a thought experiment. If we had no military presence in Afghanistan right now, and the situation were similar (a small contingent of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Af-Pak border region, a weak and corrupt Afghan government, a large scale Islamist insurgency that threatens that government’s continued viability), would committing 100,000 troops to stabilize the government, defeat the Taliban and eliminate al-Qaeda be something we were seriously considering? I doubt it.

The problem, it seems to me, is that once wars get started, it’s politically almost impossible to end them without either a) winning or b) committing political suicide. Some have proposed that President Obama should have the “courage” to tell the American people that the war isn’t winnable in any real sense, and that it’s time for us to begin winding it down. That may be true. Americans’ lives are at stake, after all. Still, it should at least be acknowledged that were Obama to follow that course, he would probably be sealing the fate of his administration. I don’t care how many Americans are skeptical about the war in Afghanistan. Most of those same people would punish Obama severely if the U.S. were to withdraw and they watched the government there fall to the Taliban.

I’ve bolded the crucial nugget of his post. He’s right of course. Who could imagine such a thing? But now that we’re there, who can imagine simply leaving?

That thought doesn’t temper the bitter disappointment of Garry Willis though, at Obama’s decision to ramp up what he regards as an unnecessary and intractable conflict:

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

Iraq at least had a functioning government (though a tyrannical one). The Afghanistan government that replaced the Taliban is not only corrupt but ineffectual. The country is riven by tribal war, Islamic militancy, and warlordism, and fueled by a drug economy —interrupting the drug industry will destabilize what order there is and increase hostility to us.

We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, earning hatred as occupiers, and after this record for longevity in American wars we will be there for still more years earning even more hatred. It gives us not another Iraq but another Vietnam, with wobbly rulers and an alien culture.

Although Obama says he plans to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011, he will meanwhile be sending there not only soldiers but the contract employees that cling about us now like camp followers, corrupt adjuncts in perpetuity. Obama did not mention these plagues that now equal the number of military personnel we dispatch. We are sending off thousands of people to take and give bribes to drug dealers in Afghanistan.

If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.

I think we still have a chance in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean Eckel isn’t right about the insanity of the circumstances that have led us to this point, and it doesn’t mean that Willis might not be right about the utter foolishness of hoping for a positive outcome.

It’s not exactly a surprise that Obama is set to announce an escalation of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan in his address tonight, for two reasons: one, McClatchy tipped us off last week and two, escalation almost seems like it was inevitable. For all the stories about Obama’s painstaking deliberations, can anyone imagine that he would go on TV tonight and announce no increase, or a draw down of troops? Yeah, me neither. There is one element to this NY Times story on the announcement that catches my eye though:

… clearly Mr. Obama does not trust the central government with much of the new American aid. Money will go to individual ministries depending on their performance, American officials have said in recent weeks. The United States, officials said, will also funnel more money and other assistance through local leaders to foster change from the bottom up, avoiding the country’s corrupt central government.

That is bound to foster some resentment inside Mr. Karzai’s government because it creates a direct link between the United States and local governments and leaders, a process that could further weaken Mr. Karzai’s authority over parts of the nation.

That makes sense…sort of. Except, if we’re undermining the authority of the central government, and cementing the loyalty of local leaders to American and NATO commanders, who exactly is supposed to take over when we decide it’s time to go? I’m not a huge fan of funneling billions of dollars to a corrupt government (and the corrupt leaders of that government) but if we’re out of the nation-building business as the article states earlier, then at what point do we stop giving money to local tribal leaders, and what do they do then? I’d like to know the answers to those questions.

Also, I recommend Glenn Greenwald as a counter-point to the supporters of the escalation (which includes myself, most reluctantly) who are assuming an extraordinarily more capable performance from the Obama administration. I won’t excerpt the post because the whole thing should be read, but suffice it to say he catalogs the depressingly similar justifications and goals trotted by the Bush administration and the Obama administration for their relative “surges.”

When I say I support this escalation reluctantly, I mean exactly that. I don’t mean I shake my head and sigh and lament the loss of lives and say “these things must be done sometimes.” I don’t mean I support the escalation because I think it has to be done even though it means more American and Afghan lives will be lost. What I mean is, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do at all, but neither am I sure that it’s the wrong thing to do. I will tell you that this is the direct result of years of reading and blogging about Iraq. Anybody who reads our archives can figure out pretty quickly that I was convinced that the situation in Iraq would only worsen until we were forced to withdraw our troops in futility. I wasn’t alone in that regard. It’s not difficult for me to admit that I was wrong about something (it had better not be for anybody who posts their opinions for everyone in the world to read.) But it is difficult for me to face the fact that despite reading almost everything I could find about Iraq for years from the invasion up to the surge in early 2007, I was utterly uninformed about the dynamic in Iraq that would eventually tamp down the conflict that boiled over in 2006. This is not to say that Iraq is at peace (far from it) but it’s clear that the situation in Iraq now is dramatically better than it was in early 2006, or even in 2007. Maybe it’s temporary, but only in the sense that conflict could still break out over certain flash points (say between the Kurds and the central government) and not in the sense that conflict once existed; for the most part, it would appear that a widespread Sunni insurgency is largely over.

All of that which is to say that the experience in Iraq has taught me a hard lesson about the certainty of our knowledge about the internal dynamics of a country at war. Which is why, despite the ever-worsening fight against the Taliban, I cannot say for certain that the escalation (and our entire mission) in Afghanistan, is doomed to failure. Is that possible? Yes. Maybe even probable. Is it certain? I don’t think so, and I don’t think anyone who says that it is can possibly be as certain as they sound.

That being said, it is the inevitability of the escalation that depresses me the most. I think there’s still a chance that the Taliban can be co-opted into giving up the fight via a power-sharing arrangement, and I think that’s worth fighting for on our behalf and on the behalf of the Afghan people who would prefer such a thing. But we could be far more cynical (and perhaps realistic) and draw-down our troops to focus almost solely on hunting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and I’m not sure that our overall security against terrorist attacks would be greatly worsened. Perhaps it would be better. But such an approach would be something different at least. Maybe the Obama administration is doing the right thing in raising troop levels in Afghanistan, and maybe it’ll even work this time. But that isn’t what rescued us in Iraq, and it sure as hell didn’t work in Vietnam. And can you imagine any politician saying “You know what? Enough is enough.” I sure as hell can’t, even if they believed it to be true. So maybe we’re doing something right over there…or maybe we’re just going through the motions. That remains to be seen.

UPDATE: About that “extraordinarily more capable performance”, check this Army Times article entitled-I’m not kidding-”Trigger-happy security complicates convoys” (via ProPublica):

Ill-disciplined private security guards escorting supply convoys to coalition bases are wreaking havoc as they pass through western Kandahar province, undermining the coalition’s counterinsurgency strategy here and leading to at least one confrontation with U.S. forces, say U.S. Army officers and Afghan government officials.

The security guards are responsible for killing and wounding more than 30 innocent civilians during the past four years in Maywand district alone, said Mohammad Zareef, the senior representative in the district for Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.

[...]

Until recently, the identities of the companies for whom the security guards worked remained shrouded in mystery, even from the coalition headquarters whose troops they are supplying. French said he requested information on the companies through his higher brigade headquarters — 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division — but had yet to receive any word back.

An International Security Assistance Force spokesman said the convoy security workers are employees of the logistics contractors running the convoys. Those contractors work for one or several of the ISAF, NATO or 26 countries operating in Afghanistan. As a result, he said he did not know how much is spent on the security firms or which companies had hired them.

The only difference is the guys we’re paying to shoot up Afghan civilians are themselves Afghans this time. You know who uses contractors whose employer’s identities we can’t even figure out to fight their insurgencies? Nations with overstretched militaries, that’s who.

A couple of interesting articles worth taking note of. First, this one from Gary Sick, who gives us a much-needed dose of common-sense on Iran’s nuclear program. After noting that for seventeen years, Iran hawks have predicted that in five years Iran would have a nuclear weapon, he goes to recommend a course of action on Iran:

Iran currently has about enough LEU [low enriched uranium] to be able to produce a single crude nuclear device. But in order to do so, it would either have to build a completely secret production line or else withdraw from the NPT, kick out the IAEA inspectors, and try to proceed. The more inspectors are on the ground (and Iran is presently the most inspected country under IAEA supervision), the less likely it is that a completely covert facility can be created. Use of the present enrichment facilities to produce bomb-grade uranium would certainly be noticed and reported. It is an early warning system.

If Iran has a known capacity to be able to build a bomb, its negotiating leverage is nearly as great as if it actually had one or two crude bombs in its possession. That calculation, we now know, was the shah’s strategy before the 1979 revolution; it is very likely the strategy of his successors. It maximizes influence and minimizes risk.

[...]

What if Iran got a bomb? Well, unless they buy one intact, the process of actually moving to weaponization is likely to be noticed, so one must ask what happens between the moment when they decide to proceed to a bomb and when they actually have it. That period, which is apt to be several years, would be the true case of the ticking time bomb, and that would be the moment for consideration of extreme pressure tactics, probably with very wide support in the international community. Iran knows this, and that is itself a disincentive for them to proceed.

The real purpose of negotiations, in my view, is to build a system of monitoring and inspections that will (1) provide maximum early warning of a potential future Iranian decision to “break out;” and (2) insure the maximum possible interval between that moment and the moment where Iran could actually have a bomb. Iran has said on several occasions that it is willing to accept such an enhanced inspection regime, but it will no doubt insist on a price. That, I think, is what the negotiations should be about.

An inspection regime would give us some peace of mind and advance notice of Iran’s efforts to actually build a bomb, while giving Iran the leverage to demand concessions of some kind in return. The question of course is, what might Iran want, and can we give it to them? That’s ripe for another blog post.

The Washington Post published this article on Afghanistan yesterday, noting how elements of the Taliban have left their Arabic patrons in Al Qaeda behind to an extent as the war has evolved:

[Mullah Mohammed] Omar’s mission is to force U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and to recapture the country. His group is particularly active in attacking U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, his home base.

This year, Omar’s military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties — much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai’s government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda’s agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

In a February interview with al-Samoud magazine, Taliban political committee leader Agha Jan Mutassim praised the Saudi Arabian government, called for Muslim unity and said the Taliban “respects all different Islamic schools and branches without any discrimination” in Afghanistan.

Such positions may put Omar’s Taliban at odds with al-Qaeda’s extremist Sunni agenda of overthrowing what it sees as corrupt Muslim governments and targeting Shiites. Analysts said that Omar, who leads a council of Taliban commanders based in or around the Pakistani city of Quetta, wants such countries as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government if it regains power and that he has little interest in fomenting war elsewhere.

“We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others,” Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a “revolution,” said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. “Al-Qaeda’s path is now different from the Taliban’s path, and they are growing more separated.”

The article notes however that Al Qaeda is virtually intertwined with the Taliban forces led by Jallaludin Haqqani in eastern Afghanistan and with the Pakistani Taliban, and operates unrestrained but for the fear of remote drone attacks in western Pakistan. But a slightly widening gulf between the Taliban of the former leader of Afghanistan offers a glimpse possibilities for reconciliation of some kind with elements of the Taliban in the future. A glimpse no doubt, but still something to consider.