The Trouble in Afghanistan

Easier said than done.
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Joe–I’ve been wondering about the realism of the SOFA. I’ve long believed that the US will never withdraw entirely from Iraq, because it will be impossible to retain the country as a reliable client state without occupying forces, and without providing national defense capability (air, armor, logistics) that the country itself will not be permitted to acquire. I put up a blog post about this a while ago. Rose, in a comment, suggested permanent force levels of around 20,000 is what she expects.

Elizabeth Bumiller has an article today where Odierno says he expects troops to remain in Iraqi cities after the 2009 deadline.

Is there any way to get a realistic conversation going in the public sphere of what the plans for American occupation really are? Because the idea of complete withdrawal is simply not consistent with an Iraqi client state, or even an ally. Certainly not with actual elections taking place and no national defense force.

Easier said than done.
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Joe–I’ve been wondering about the realism of the SOFA. I’ve long believed that the US will never withdraw entirely from Iraq, because it will be impossible to retain the country as a reliable client state without occupying forces, and without providing national defense capability (air, armor, logistics) that the country itself will not be permitted to acquire. I put up a blog post about this a while ago. Rose, in a comment, suggested permanent force levels of around 20,000 is what she expects.
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Elizabeth Bumiller has an article today where Odierno says he expects troops to remain in Iraqi cities after the 2009 deadline.
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Is there any way to get a realistic conversation going in the public sphere of what the plans for American occupation really are? Because the idea of complete withdrawal is simply not consistent with an Iraqi client state, or even an ally. Certainly not with actual elections taking place and no national defense force.

Easier said than done.
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Joe–I’ve been wondering about the realism of the SOFA. I’ve long believed that the US will never withdraw entirely from Iraq, because it will be impossible to retain the country as a reliable client state without occupying forces, and without providing national defense capability (air, armor, logistics) that the country itself will not be permitted to acquire. I put up a (kroydblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/soft-sofa.html)blog post about this a little while ago. Rose, in a comment, suggested permanent force levels of around 20,000.
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Elizabeth Bumiller has an article today where Odierno says he expects troops to remain in Iraqi cities after the 2009 deadline.
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Is there any way to get a realistic conversation going in the public sphere of what the plans for American occupation really are? Because the idea of complete withdrawal is simply not consistent with an Iraqi client state, or even an ally. Certainly not with actual elections taking place and no national defense force.

jay seems to really want to make his point.
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Joe, thank you for posting this. Otherwise, I would have missed Ms. Chayes astonishing report. Your first post on Afghanistan the other day led to a very good thread, with considerable discussion of the nature of Afghan society pre-soviet invasion. I think this paragraph from the Post article captured it perfectly:
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Afghans remember the reign in the 1960s and ’70s of King Zahir Shah and his cousin Daoud Khan, when Afghan cities were among the most developed and cosmopolitan in the Muslim world, when Peace Corps volunteers conducted vaccination campaigns on foot through a welcoming countryside, and when, my friends here tell me, a lone, unarmed policeman could detain a criminal suspect in a far-flung village without obstruction. Kandaharis — even those who lost a brother or father in the 1980s war against Soviet occupation — praise the communist-backed government of former president Najibullah. "His officials weren’t building marble-clad mansions with the money they extorted," says Fayzullah, another member of my cooperative.

jay, I responded to your response down yonder:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/12/12/why-people-hate-columnists/?apage=2#comment-27719

Here is a simple question Joe Klein. Is there any way that you can see how we can actually “win” in Afghanistan in a best case scenario?
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Based on your reporting and others I am beginning to get the strongest impression that the answer is no but nobody wants to say it.
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Somewhat shameful plug, I now have a blog. I am inviting any and everyone to drop by any time. (yes even you textee)

Sorry about that.

hilzoy has a piece on Iraq that is highly relevant to the Post story. Seems that “our” folks in Iraq thought they could transfer the strengthen the warlord model we used so “successfully” in Afghanistan.
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Last night I wrote about the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s draft report. The NYT has put the draft online here. I’m still reading through it, but here’s a bit from p. 65. The scene is an interagency conference on reconstruction about a month before we invaded:
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"Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA’s humanitarian pillar, asked, "How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?" A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, "Hire war lords." "Wait a minute," Ward thought, "folks don’t understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent." "At that point," Ward says, "I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.""
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A month before the invasion, and people still didn’t understand absolutely basic facts about the country they were planning to invade.
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It’s not news, but every new instance of this kind of basic ignorance about a country whose government we were proposing to topple, and which we were proposing to rebuild, still takes my breath away.
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Of course, by the time of the Anbar Awakening, there were warlords aplenty.

wvng
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That goes along with the report yesterday of Donny Rumsfeld saying we would not spend a billion dollars of our own money in Iraq just before the invasion. Yes, Seriously

sgw: That goes along with the report . . . that the Bush administration has the deepest disdain for actual knowledge of all types. The entire last 8 years are a monument to ideological belief over objective knowledge. They went out of their way to ignore the vast amount of actual information about Iraq, and the detailed reality-based plans, found in their own State Department.
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Of course, we all know this, and many have reported on it. Here’s Dr. Judson on the Wild Side blog at the Times:
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President-elect Obama already has a long to-do list. But here’s another item for it: to restore science in government.
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The most notable characteristic of the Bush administration’s science policy has been the repeated distortion and suppression of scientific evidence in order to fit ideological preferences about how the world should be, rather than how it is.

wvng
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Did you see where that azzhat Inhofe is at it again trying to deny climate change? How does any reasonable person vote for a Republican EVER?

OT, but I have a question for Joe. Is there any journalists universe where a journalist can be allowed to do this?:
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CONNOLLY: Word on the street is that Karl Rove is going to be helping lead the fight against Eric Holder when his nomination for Attorney General heads up to the Senate.

sgw: How does any reasonable person vote for a Republican EVER? Interesting question. A poll that was pretty widely reported the other days indicates that many people who voted for Bush either have conveniently forgotten that they did of lie that they didn’t (I think the numbers are around 30% saying they ever voted for him). It is just possible that the “break the union” escapade currently going on will make it impossible for anyone to remember ever voting for a repuglican, or actually ever voting for a repuglican again. Fer Gawd’s Sake, they are killing the Big 3 to protect foreign automakers. The NASCAR crowd won’t be happy if Chevy and Ford get killed.

wvng
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You did see where Leahy let Specter and the rest of the rethugs have it over the Holder nomination right? I wish he were the majority leader, seriously.

A simple question: Are we even making things better? Are our actions making it less likely a future terrorist attack or war will be triggered in Afghanistan?
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Now people have to choose between the corrupt Karzai government and the Taliban. Maybe if we were not aiding the Karzai government a better opposition to the Taliban would eventually arise; It’s difficult for such a movement to build up when there are already two other political options. Pressuring Pakistan AND India to be tougher on terrorism and religious extremism may be more productive than focusing so much on Afghanistan.

rose, Obama has been plenty clear that the corruption in the Karzai gov’t has got to stop. Hoagland has a fine op-ed about Obama’s ability to use language in pursuit of change here and abroad:
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The power of the presidential jawbone atrophied under his two immediate predecessors. But Barack Obama has shown that he will employ subtle threats, brazen promises and words at large as his ambassadors in pursuit of personal and national goals.
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It is not a matter of being good at speechifying, which Obama certainly is. It is a matter of calculating — at which Obama also excels — the precise effect of words unleashed in presidential addresses, news conferences and on-the-hoof occasions. They all shape the battlegrounds on which a national leader must fight.

sgw, I did. That is what is called a properly calibrated public response designed to put repug actions in the proper context. Reid seems to have no idea how to do this. Where oh where is the Reid who jumped over a desk and started pummeling the guy who tried to bribe him?

wvng, I’m sure Obama understands the problems much better than Bush, and obviously he can verbally express American policies approximately 1,000 times better than Bush. But it’s important to remember that there is no historical precedent of a successful military intervention in Afghanistan.

Joe: do you really see a future for US interests in Afghanistan? We get lots of anecdotal info on specifics acts against groups and individuals. But can we prevent that if the Afghanis allow it to happen. What is our interest? I can understand the view that Afghanistan’s stability should be of concern to Pakistan, India and Iran. Other than stopping Al Q from settling into their own bases what else do we gain?

Here is what I think the truth is that nobody wants to say. In order for us to actually not only stabilize Afghanistan but make lasting changes we will need MORE troops than we had in Iraq and we will have to oust Karzai and put our own guy in. Thats not to say we SHOULD do it, but that to me is the honest to God truth of the situation. Anything less and either the region plunges into total chaos with loose nukes in the equation OR we find ourselves in a situation worse than Iraq and Vietnam COMBINED.
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Again just my opinion.

Rose, that is the question, isn’t it. As in America after 9-11, Bush absolutely squandered/obliterated the goodwill of the Afghani people after the liberation, and the question is – “is it possible to get it back?” If the answer is yes, then there is still a chance. If no, then we will be as one with all the other invaders. with From the Post:
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This is why the Taliban are making headway in Afghanistan — not because anyone loves them, even here in their former heartland, or longs for a return to their punishing rule. I arrived in Kandahar in December 2001, just days after Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was chased out. After a moment of holding its breath, the city erupted in joy. Kites danced on the air for the first time in six years. Buyers flocked to stalls selling music cassettes. I listened to opium dealers discuss which of them would donate the roof of his house for use as a neighborhood school. I, a barefaced American woman, encountered no hostility at all. Curiosity, plenty. But no hostility. Enthusiasm for the nascent government of Hamid Karzai and its international backers was absolutely universal.
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Since then, the hopes expressed by every Afghan I have encountered — to be ruled by a responsive and respectful government run by educated people — have been dashed.

Way down in Joe’s last Afghan thread, I posted a letter my brother (a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan in the 70s)wrote to his local paper in Virginia shortly after 9-11, when the rhetoric of vengeance was at its worst. It seems relevant to link it again.
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http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/12/11/latest-column-5/?apage=2#comment-27383

Great analysis, except the fact you’re just writing about someone elses experience and opinion, all while you contiue to parrot whatever Obama says.

OT
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Also I will be blogging the Bucs/Falcons game here for anybody that is interested.

pointing and laughing
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BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

OT, but since I’m avoiding MS’ threads, John Cole in a moment of brilliance:
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I am calling it now- John King, on CNN, just proclaimed that there is no allegation of wrong-doing in the Blagojevich case regarding the Obama team, but that he better prove he is innocent and get it right because he said he would have an open and transparent administration.
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Got it? Unless Obama proves he didn’t do anything wrong, when he hasn’t been accused of any wrong doing, there will be hell to pay.
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Now, no one has accused John King of buggering young children after luring them into his van down by the river with promises of candy and then feeding them rum balls and Jesus Juice, but he better prove this is the case or there will be big problems for King and CNN. What did Wolf Blitzer know about this? It would be irresponsible to not speculate about this.

Oh, and jksks, Sully write this for you:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/12/obama-and-pragm.html
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Is it too late to point and laugh
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HA HA HA HA HA HA BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA?

wvng at 10.54 said,
“Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA’s humanitarian pillar, asked, “How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?” A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, “Hire war lords.” “Wait a minute,” Ward thought, “folks don’t understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent.” “At that point,” Ward says, “I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.”"
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A month before the invasion, and people still didn’t understand absolutely basic facts about the country they were planning to invade.
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It’s not news, but every new instance of this kind of basic ignorance about a country whose government we were proposing to topple, and which we were proposing to rebuild, still takes my breath away.
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You know, it’s not even a matter of knowing the country, although that ignorance surely cost us. What’s worse to me is the lack of even basic logic or critical thinking.
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Any layperson paying the slightest attention during the ’80s, early ’90s, or early 2000s knew Saddam controlled Iraq with an iron fist. And that’s all you’d need to know — Saddam’s control meant he would never tolerate warlords, hence that could not possibly be a solution to guarding anything.
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That a CENTCOM flag officer could not even apply that minimal logic leads me reluctantly to the conclusion that a) the quality of our military officers is on a par with “Brownie’s” FEMA, or b) their judgement was thoroughly intimidated by the neocon ideologues, or c)as Ward thought, they just didn’t care, or d) some combination of a-c.
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It certainly doesn’t bode well for effectiveness in Afghanistan, either.

Check out the raw video on this page of an Iraqi journo throwing shoes at bushie.
Bush says Iraq war ‘necessary’ on farewell visit – Yahoo! News

I wonder if Richard Perle still thinks there will be a Bush Square in Baghdad?

More color from the shoe incident:

As the two leaders shook hands in Maliki’s private office, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the US president, shouting: “It is the farewell kiss, you dog.” Bush was not struck.

Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam’s statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue’s face with their soles.

Source: AFP Bush says ‘war not over’ on farewell Iraq visit

Agreed. In order to establish a Soviet utopia in Afghanistan, we definitely need geniuses like Field Marshall Joe Klein and the thoroughly unqualified, terrorist fraterninzing, community organizer to shower Afghanistan with their military expertise.

Pointing and laughing . . .
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HA HA HA HA HA HA BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

More on the shoe incident at Think Progress Think Progress » Iraqi Journalist Throws His Shoes At Bush During Press Conference In Baghdad (Updated)

//MSNBC has video of the incident with correspondent Patty Culhane reporting that Bush was “not injured” but that White House Press Secretary Dana Perino received a black eye in the scuffle of trying to contain Zaidi.
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I guess she got a microphone to the eye.

It seems like an appropriate cap to the “You’re welcome, Iraq” farewell tour.

All I can say is that it all makes no sense. None of it. James, thanks for the shoe video, but all I can find is the video. Who is this person? Where did he come from? The bang of the shoe even made me flinch watching it, and I gotta say Bush still has his baseball reflexes. I will call Bush a clod, inept, stupid, and countless other descriptions, but if I had been standing next to Shoe Man, I would have decked him.
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Back to Afhan, again, nothing makes sense. We went there in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Took out the Taliban because they harbored al Queda, not because the Taliban were international terrorists. The whole international terrorists war was completely compromised and made a joke by the invasion of Iraq. Yeah, Sadam harbored terrorists. Sure. That’s how he maintained his iron fist, by paling around with idiots.
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Sarah Chayes mystifies me. A Jewish woman settling in Afghanistan to set up a cooperative beauty business. What?? Karzi? He has been in bed with the Taliban before and no doubt, being the opportunist that he is, would be again in a flash. I doubt that he is high on their hit list.
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But my main thought is back to the idiocy of American foreign policy. I have challenged Joe on this issue before when he has proclaimed that the Obama administration will introduce some departure from Bush, who did not depart from traditional idiotic policy of the past. Only upt it a bit with the crazy dog former Trotskyite neocons.
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Every human is doing the best they can to survive and to achieve whatever prosperity they can. When our country recognizes that and just allows that to happen, and stops manipulating unnecessarily in other people’s business, we will all be better off. I believe in defense, I don’t discount war when necessary, but I don’t think that our foreign policy and intelligence operations in other countries has served that purpose.

james, he is a tv reporter for the baghdad station apparently.
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Shoe attack on Bush mars farewell Iraq visit – Yahoo! News

Shoe “attack”, that’s a little melodramatic.

According to Bush it was only a size 10, so not so melodramatic.

This is a goodbye kiss you dog. Then both shoes.

In the Muslim world, according to Hume Horan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “to have the sole of the shoe directed toward one is pretty much the equivalent of someone in our culture giving you the finger.” Matthew Gordon, a historian of Islam, says that since one takes one’s shoes off before entering a mosque–as a way of maintaining the purity of the place of worship–”the use of a shoe as something to hit you with is an inversion, directing impurity and pollution at the object of the beating.”
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Sometimes context helps me.

PNNTO
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Recently Bill Richardson recounted a story from when he was an ambassador and he went to Saddam to ask him to release some prisoners. Evidently he wasn’t well versed in the culture and he crossed his legs in such a way that the soles of his shoes were turned to Saddam. Evidently Saddam got up in a huff and walked out in the middle of the convo. And Bill Richardson had to send his apologies to get him to come back in and sit back down

Please allow me to bend over, spread my cheeks, and moon not just Islam, but all religions.
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Whatever the symbolic meaning of the bottom of a shoe is, it can sure smart if it hits your face with the force I saw on the video. The guy was really giving it his best to be beat to death and meet his virgins.

Stop that Mohamed, you can take an eye out.

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FROGMARCHED!!!!
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BAGHDAD (AFP) – A journalist hurled two shoes at President George W. Bush on his farewell visit to Iraq on Sunday, highlighting hostility still felt toward the outgoing US leader who acknowledged that the war is still not won.

“Muntazer al-Zaidi jumped up as Bush held a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, shouted “It is the farewell kiss, you dog” and threw his footwear.
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The president lowered his head and the first shoe hit the American and Iraqi flags behind the two leaders. The second was off target.
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Zaidi, a reporter with the Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo, was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.”
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Shoe attack on Bush mars farewell Iraq visit – Yahoo! News

Better.

That’s funny SG, considering how secular Saddam was. Shows that it’s a cultural insult derived from religion I think.
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Capital Punishment for show throwing james? You are pretty law and order!

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coffee, niiiiice! Oh yeah!
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I’m a bad bad person, but I’m happy that the main story out of Bush’s Iraq “victory” tour was the shoe attack.
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I know frogmarching is rigorus, but is it an insult? Do you get virgins for frogmarching?
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Sorry if my moon post interupted any Sunday prayer meetings. I forgot what day it was.
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James LA screwed up the original Afghan thread with the Iraq shoe stomp. It’s all his fault.

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james,
the froggmarch thing dates back years ago when Joe Wilson said he wanted to see the day that Rove was frogmarched out of the White House, for outing his wife.
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Like so:RoveFrogMarch.jpg (JPEG Image, 425×376 pixels)

James, we can only wish. Rove will be as happy and warm as a puppy as he makes $millions$ off his rape of the American ideal.

Something about me. I always make it too the 2nd page.

Bet there are lot of Iraqi families that would like to throw their shows at Bush too.

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This is the first time he has gone to Iraq when he didn’t skulk in under the cover of darkness.
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The priveleged class in Iraq after the American obliteration. Guys who have shoes to throw.

Hey, but what about Afghanistan? What is with that Karzi? Friend or foe? The CIA is workin to try to figure it out. Don’t even mention Pakistan.

It’s heartbreaking when you consider what could have gone right with our efforts in Afghanistan is Bush & Co. hadn’t decided to blow the Afghans off and go after Iraq.
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No sadder words than ‘might have been’ and all that.

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james,
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Karzai is Bush’s man. Ex-oil exec installed by Cheney-Rumsfeld to run things in Afghanistan while they got their war on in Iraq. He’s about as corrupt as they come, and that’s why they put him in. I think he like another Chalabi type.
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Watch the first part of Bush’s War for more details. He|| watch the whole thing.
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FRONTLINE: bush’s war | PBS

Pakistan is the ISI. It exists to fight India. Pakistan cannot win a direct confrontation with India. Therefore, 1) it fights by proxy in Kashmir, and 2) it destabilizes Afghanistan in order to own it, so that India does not set up a second front there.
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The ISI uses jihadis to perform both tasks. It houses and trains them, and sometimes shuttles them from one front to the other. They do suffer blowback from this strategy, but they look at it as ancillary damage.
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Thus, asking Pakistan to crack down on terrorism is like asking a snake to be vegan. Anyone who thinks they can handle that job should first try something easier, like solving Israel/Palestine.

Wow.

Klein advocates what is basically a military coup of the elected Afghan government, and no one blinks an eye.

While not denying that the Karzai government is corrupt, it is important to note that he first came to power as a result of the traditional “loya jirga”, and became president as a result of national elections in 2004. An Afghani parliament was elected in 2005.

For Joe to suggest that we can ignore the elected government of Afghanistan, and instead just fund its military, is a prescription for a new series of disasters in that country.

[...] enormous challenges remain in Afghanistan; read more about it here, here, & [...]