Topic: Afghanistan

Karzai, Corruption, and CIA Bags of Cash

Max Boot 05.06.2013 - 12:10 PM

You’ve got to hand it to Hamid Karzai. He is nothing if not brazen. Other world leaders might be embarrassed if caught accepting bags of cash from the CIA. Not Karzai. Instead, he is bragging to reporters that the CIA money was “an easy source of petty cash” and reassuring anyone who will listen that he will continue on the CIA payroll.

The question is: What is the CIA getting for its (read: our) money? I am not opposed in principle to the CIA paying off the leaders of other countries; it has certainly done so before. If intelligently used, cash can be a valuable part of an influence operation; it can be a vital source of support for strong pro-American leaders such as Ramon Magsaysay, the president of the Philippines from 1953 to 1957.

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Déjà Vu All Over Again in Afghanistan

Michael Rubin 05.02.2013 - 10:10 AM

I am not an optimist when it comes to Afghanistan. The United States lost the Afghan war the second President Obama issued a public timeline for withdrawal and when diplomats offered to negotiate with the Taliban. Officials endorsing such timelines—too often out of political perspicacity rather than military wisdom—are culpable in setting the stage for defeat. Momentum matters in Afghanistan more than spin, as Afghans have never lost a war: they simply defect to the winning side.

The White House may believe its spin, but no one in Afghanistan does. Whereas the Taliban once embraced the narrative of the First Anglo-Afghan War, describing Mullah Omar as Dost Muhammad and Hamid Karzai as Shah Shujah, with the implication that ISAF forces would play the role of the British heading into a disastrous retreat, the historical allusions have changed in recent months as Afghans filter events through the living memory of the Soviet withdrawal. Hence, Hamid Karzai has become Najibullah in the current Afghan narrative. Najibullah, of course, was the last Communist leader of Afghanistan. True, Najibullah managed to hold onto power for three years following the Soviet withdrawal, but he fell as soon as the rubles—about $3 billion per year—dried up. Afghans recognize that most of the money promised in the past years’ series of international donor conferences will never get delivered.

Further, when the World Bank estimates the foreign assistance that Afghanistan will require to stay afloat, they too often assume that the Afghan mining industry will be far more advanced than reality will dictate. In the past year, real estate prices have dropped 20 percent in Afghanistan as Afghans recognize that the long-term prospects for rule of law are dim.

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More Consequences of Leading from Behind in Libya

Max Boot 04.23.2013 - 7:00 PM

The evidence of the baleful effects of the Obama administration’s shameful neglect of post-Gaddafi Libya continues to pile up.

We already know that by failing to help the pro-Western government to establish control of its country, we not only created the conditions which led to the death of our ambassador and other Americans last September 11 but also destabilized neighboring countries. The outflow of arms and fighters from Libya tipped the balance of power in Mali and allowed al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to seize control of the northern part of the country until a French intervention dislodged them (perhaps only temporarily).

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The State of British Counterinsurgency–and its Lesson for the U.S.

Max Boot 04.22.2013 - 11:20 AM

From the 1950s to the 1990s–from the Malayan Emergency to the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland–British troops developed a reputation as the foremost counterinsurgency experts in the world. Iraq and Afghanistan have been the undoing of their reputation.

In Iraq, British troops allowed Basra to become taken over by Shiite extremists and criminals. They hunkered down in an airbase outside the city even as extremists rained rockets and mortars down upon them. Order was not restored until Prime Minister Maliki ordered an Iraqi assault, Operation Charge of the Knights, in 2008, which received some much-needed, last-minute American help.

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U.S. Should Not Stay on the Sidelines of Afghan Election

Max Boot 04.17.2013 - 10:50 AM

Michele Flournoy and Michael O’Hanlon are right to argue in this Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. has a big stake in the outcome of Afghanistan’s April 2014 presidential election. They are right, moreover, that we must do everything possible to safeguard the integrity of the balloting process. But I disagree with their assertion–which amounts to a bipartisan article of faith in today’s Washington–that “the United States and other key outside nations shouldn’t and won’t try to pick a winner.”

Tell it to Pakistan. Do Flournoy and O’Hanlon have any confidence that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence will refrain from picking a winner? Or Iran’s Quds Forces? What about the brutal and corrupt warlords and power brokers who dominate Afghan politics today in collusion with current president Hamid Karzai? Will they refrain from picking a candidate too?

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The Future of Nation Building

Max Boot 03.19.2013 - 11:00 AM

There are two essential lessons one can draw from the Iraq War: either that we should never get mired in counterinsurgency or “nation-building” operations in the future or that, if we do get involved, we should do a better job of achieving our objectives. The prevailing wisdom in Washington adheres to the former position, but I believe the latter lesson offers more useful guidance for the future.

No less an eminence than Bob Gates, on his way out the door as secretary of defense, proclaimed, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Although he subsequently walked back that statement, it is fair to say that Gates’ view is now the conventional wisdom.

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Karzai Needs the U.S. More Than the U.S. Needs Him

Max Boot 03.13.2013 - 12:25 PM

If the standard by which we judge policymakers is the same as for physicians–first, do no harm–than Chuck Hagel’s foray to Afghanistan, his first as defense secretary, was a success. There were no big achievements to boast of but also no major slip-ups. Hagel certainly gets points for the patience he displayed with Hamid Karzai, who was even more exasperating than usual.

In recent days the Afghan president has tried to push U.S. Special Forces out of Wardak Province, a Taliban-infested area near Kabul; tried to renege on the pledge he had made to give the U.S. veto authority over prisoner releases at the major detention facility in Parwan province; and even claimed that the U.S. secretly supported the Taliban to give us an excuse to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hagel handled it all with equanimity, replying, when asked by the press about such issues, “it’s complicated”–which is the appropriate noncommittal reply when dealing with such a prickly ally.

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Why Mattis Will Be Missed

Max Boot 03.06.2013 - 6:30 PM

The Obama administration may regret pushing General James Mattis, the brilliant and blunt-talking Marine who is head of Central Command, into retirement for a variety of reasons—not the least of them being that, with his impending retirement looming, he has felt free to voice undiplomatic truths.

In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, he was asked whether sanctions and diplomacy were preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms. His blunt answer: “No, sir” He followed up by explaining: “That should not be in any way construed as we should not try to negotiate. I still support the direction we’re taking. I’m just — I’m paid to take a rather dim view of the Iranians, frankly.” Needless to say his “dim view” is a lot closer to reality than the daydreams of political staffers in the White House who imagine that some kind of diplomatic breakthrough with the mullahs is likely.

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The White House’s Self-Destructive Cynics

Seth Mandel 03.06.2013 - 2:15 PM

The Obama administration’s promise to make the country’s work force suffer as much as possible for their representatives’ inability to stop the sequester—which was Obama’s idea—seems to mean more work for at least one sector of the American economy: fact-checkers. They are overworked trying to keep up with the task of debunking the White House’s embarrassing parade of false talking points and misrepresentations about the effects of the budget cuts included in the sequester.

Because this legion of fact-checkers are really just opinion bloggers, the White House doesn’t have too much to lose from subjective statements that are open to interpretation—which the fact-checkers inexplicably often “fact check” despite the absurdity of it. But the administration has stumbled in offering verifiably false statistics, which removes the protective layer of interpretation revealing an obvious attempt to mislead the public. Today Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post seems almost agitated at the Obama administration’s antics:

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Jihadists, Suicide, and Nuclear Weapons

Michael Rubin 03.04.2013 - 7:45 AM

Over at The Long War Journal, Lisa Lundquist examines the decision by Pakistani clerics to give religious sanction for suicide attacks. While her analysis focuses on what the Pakistani declaration means for Afghan attempts to outlaw religiously-motivated suicide attacks as part of the ongoing Afghan peace process, there are two larger points which she leaves unaddressed.

The first is pedantic, but necessary in an age when political correctness trumps reality. The Pakistani ulema council’s decision should end the nonsense quips that suicide bombing can’t be theologically-grounded, because Islam forbids suicide. The debate among Muslim theologians is actually more nuanced, and was well-covered in this Middle East Quarterly article. In short, the devil is in the details, because Koranic verse 2:154 declares, “Do not think that those who are killed in the way of God are dead, for indeed they are alive, even though you are not aware,” which means that a bystander’s assumption that the terrorist committed suicide because his head is lying on the street somewhere is wrong, since he went to paradise while still alive and therefore can’t be said to have killed himself.

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Losing Afghanistan

Michael Rubin 03.01.2013 - 4:00 PM

Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered U.S. Special Forces to leave Wardak Province following reports—rejected by U.S. forces—that they were involved in the disappearance of nine people. Karzai’s decision—and the apparent willingness of U.S. forces to go along with it—really do signal the beginning of the end. U.S. forces will withdraw not with a mission accomplished, but in defeat. Political and military claims to the contrary are nonsense, and show a profound ignorance of Afghanistan and Afghan history more than a decade into our latest involvement in that country. The defeat need not have been though; it was far more a political decision on the part of the White House than the result of any military weakness.

As my AEI colleague Ahmad Majidyar—hands down the best analyst of Afghan politics there is in the United States right now, and someone not limited by security to ISAF headquarters or our many Forward Operating Base or otherwise sucked into the military-information bubble—notes Wardak is the gateway to Kabul, the path which Taliban fighters use to infiltrate Kabul to carry out spectacular attacks. The security situation in Wardak has been declining in the past year. The Taliban have prioritized moving into Wardak as foreign forces leave.

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Can the Saudis Be Trusted in Syria?

Max Boot 02.26.2013 - 1:40 PM

What to make of news that the Saudis are providing Croatian surplus arms to the Syrian rebels?

It sounds, at first blush, like a throwback to the 1980s, when the Saudis worked with the CIA to acquire surplus military hardware from all over the world–including in Warsaw Pact states such as Poland–and then deliver them, via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, to Afghan rebels fighting the Red Army. We know from that experience that, even with extensive CIA involvement, the Saudis and Pakistanis conspired to provide the bulk of their aid to hard-line Islamist commanders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalalludin Haqqani rather than to more moderate mujahideen commanders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud.

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Three Steps Forward in Afghanistan

Max Boot 02.22.2013 - 10:05 AM

Prospects for long-term stability in Afghanistan have ticked up just a notch in the last few days. First, President Obama backloaded the withdrawal of 34,000 U.S. troops over the next year, leaving the vast majority of them in place during the fighting season that will not end until late fall. Second, Obama appears to have delayed any decision on what size force the U.S. will leave after 2014–a prudent measure given the unpredictability of any battlefield and the danger of imposing a precooked politically-ordained number that will have the effect of undercutting Afghan security forces.

Now, even more significantly, the Obama administration appears to have decided to delay cutting the size of the Afghan security forces. They now number 350,000, a figure which requires some $6 billion in annual foreign (mainly American) support. The plan had been to cut their ranks back to 240,000 or even fewer by 2015, which would reduce their cost to $4 billion but would also have the unfortunate impact of laying off more than 100,000 soldiers and police at a time when NATO troop numbers are also rapidly falling.

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re: Obama Emboldened Taliban in SOTU

Michael Rubin 02.13.2013 - 3:10 PM

I fully agree with Max Boot: Obama emboldened the Taliban with his timeline for withdrawal. Such statements may run afoul of the White House spin machine, but it’s important therefore to see how Afghans perceive the speech. From Kabul’s 1TV in Dari today with a translation from the Open Source Center, here’s former deputy interior minister General Abdol Hadi Khaled:

Insurgency has now spread to almost all parts of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is very insecure. Threats to the security of Afghanistan and the region have increased by a long way. There is a very high level of interference by the neighbors, especially of Pakistan and Iran, in Afghanistan’s affairs. Their withdrawal at this time is a decision they have taken and their decision is not their reaction to the realities on the ground in Afghanistan and the region.

Afghans have never lost a war: They just defect to the winning side. The Taliban may have steamrolled through Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. But they relied more on momentum and defection of their enemies than on their own military prowess. This time, the civil war will likely be worse: There are more power centers, and both Iran and Pakistan are emboldened. Rather than aim for victory, it seems Obama is determined to bring defeat.

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Obama’s Timetable Emboldens Taliban

Max Boot 02.13.2013 - 9:57 AM

President Obama’s announcement that half of the 66,000 US troops now in Afghanistan would be pulled out over the next year is not as bad as it could have been. He could have announced that the 34,000 troops would be pulled out by September—just as he had previously set a deadline of September 2012 to pull out roughly the same number of surge forces. This would have been especially unfortunate because September is still part of the “fighting season” in Afghanistan and taking them off the battlefield at this time cedes an important advantage to the enemy.

That is not what Obama did, however: He backloaded the withdrawal, with only 6,000 troops coming out by the end of May, another 8,000 by the end of November, and the remaining 20,000 in February 2014. That at least gives Gen. Joe Dunford, the new US/NATO commander in Kabul, the majority of the existing forces to work with during the 2013 fighting season, even if it does mean that US forces will be so denuded by April 2014 that they will have a hard time securing the presidential election which is scheduled to be held then—and which could prove of great importance to Afghanistan’s long-term stability.

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Should Democrats Always Lead During War? Part One

Jonathan S. Tobin 02.11.2013 - 12:15 PM

Tina Brown stated the obvious when she observed on Bill Maher’s show that had George W. Bush used drone attacks in the same manner as Barack Obama has done he would have been impeached a long time ago. As Pete Wehner wrote last week in a post that both Max Boot and I agreed with, a thick stench of hypocrisy hangs over the Obama administration. The president who came into office decrying Bush’s actions against terrorists as a disgrace not only later carried out many of the same policies but also doubled down on them in many respects. The large number of drone attacks in which the United States has carried out targeted assassinations of terrorists, including at least one American citizen, as well as many of their family members and bystanders, makes the enhanced interrogations and the prison at Guantanamo that so outraged liberals look like child’s play. Yet most Democrats are not rushing to the barricades the way they did when Bush and Vice President Cheney were widely said to have subverted our constitutional liberties. To the extent that any have articulated a rationale for this turnaround, the best they seem capable of doing is to assert that while Obama can be trusted to use this power, Republicans like Bush and Cheney could not.

This has conservatives fuming and rightly so. But that has not caused most of them to play the same game. Though some of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party led by Rand Paul have attacked Obama for exceeding his power, most in the GOP are backing up the president on his right to carry out the drone attacks even while grousing about his hypocrisy. But after we acknowledge the unfairness of this situation, this is hardly the first time this double standard has raised its head. It is a pattern that has held true for the past half century. Though it is a bitter pill for conservatives to swallow, perhaps its time for them to acknowledge that during prolonged wars the country is always better off if a Democrat is in the White House.

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Implications and Lessons of Afghanistan Corruption

Michael Rubin 02.08.2013 - 3:00 PM

According to the United Nations, Afghans spent $3.9 billion on bribery in 2012. According to the Associated Press report:

The cost of corruption in Afghanistan rose sharply last year to $3.9 billion, and half of all Afghans bribed public officials for services, the U.N. said Thursday. The findings came despite repeated promises by President Hamid Karzai to clean up his government… Lemahieu added the problem leads “towards alienation, frustration and a disconnect to those who should be able to give you the service provided.” Fifty percent of the adult population had to pay at least one bribe to a public official in 2012, a 9 percent drop from 2009, according to the findings, which were based on interviews last year with 6,700 Afghan adults from across the country. Meanwhile, the total cost of bribes paid to public officials increased 40 percent to $3.9 billion. That amount was double the revenue collected by the government to provide services, said [Jean-Luc] Lemahieu, head of the UNODC [U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime].

That’s nearly as much as the $4.1 billion Afghan National Security Forces need on an annual basis. In other words, if Afghanistan did not suffer the corruption problem it now does, it would be able to fund its own security forces absent endless subsidies.

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Is the U.S. Cracking Down on Corruption in Afghanistan?

Max Boot 01.31.2013 - 10:55 AM

There has been a lot of blowback in Afghanistan and Washington about the decision by U.S. military commanders to blacklist Kam Air, a large civilian airline, from receiving military contracts because it is allegedly used to ship tons of drugs to Central Asia. Predictably Kam Air is mobilizing its supporters, including Hamid Karzai, to denounce the U.S. action as an insult to a proud nation.

Hooey. There is nothing pro-Afghan about allowing U.S. government dollars to be used to support corruption and drug trafficking that is at odds with the values of the vast majority of ordinary Afghans. Yet for all too long U.S. spending has not been closely monitored and has gone to benefit kleptocrats and warlords, two categories that are almost synonymous in Afghanistan. Abusive government has been the Taliban’s biggest recruiting tool and U.S. failure to do more to stem the misuse of its funds the biggest mistake the U.S. has made during a decade of war.

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Iraq’s Lessons for France in Mali

Max Boot 01.28.2013 - 10:45 AM

The French are having initial and not unexpected success in Mali. Their fast-moving troops have taken the major city of Gao and are now about to enter fabled Timbuktu. Their advance was made possible–just as with the rapid American success in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003–by the revulsion of ordinary people with a hated and despotic regime. Incredibly, Malians are shouting “Vive la France” to welcome their onetime colonial rulers back.

The epitaph–at least for the time being–for Islamist rule in northern Mali comes from a 26-year-old Malian student quoted in the New York Times lamenting: “No smoking, no music, no girlfriends. We couldn’t do anything fun.” This recalls the Iraqi man who famously greeted the American invasion of Iraq with those immortal words: “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”

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Obama Flunks Mali’s Lesson

Michael Rubin 01.28.2013 - 8:05 AM

After criticizing French plans to counter Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in northern Mali, the Obama administration is slowly increasing its support to the French, as the French military conducts a mission vital to U.S. interests as well as their own.

Mali is a beautiful country, one which I visited as a tourist a decade ago. (My thoughts from the time are encapsulated in this New Republic article). It was also the Muslim majority country which Freedom House had, for years, rated as most free. Despite being one of the poorest countries on earth and democratic, Mali was for years ignored by the United States.

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