Thoughts on Pakistan and Foreign Policy

You wouldn't necessarily know it given what passes for journalism on TV and in many of our newspapers, but there's considerable worldwide activity in foreign policy going on these days. Much of that activity is coming from the United States and much of it is happening elsewhere.

It's probably the most foreign policy activity since the Berlin Wall came down. Why is this? I shouldn't have to ask the question but in the absence of news coverage, it may be time to remind people of the obvious: for eight years (but particularly in the first four) George W. Bush did enormous damage to America's foreign policy and enormous damage to the world economy.

Since January of this year, Barack Obama and his advisers have been working to repair the damage. Worldwide, other leaders are readjusting their foreign policy and increasingly, as was happening in the last two or three years of the Bush presidency, pursuing their own agenda.

Here's just one example of foreign policy going on elsewhere:

Russia and China are closing in on a mammoth energy deal which could insure that Beijing has the fuel to run its factories and cities and Moscow has a vast new market for its natural gas empire.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday wrapped up a three-day visit to the Chinese capital, during which Russia signed dozens of commercial pacts worth $3.5 billion and set the framework for a separate, multibillion-dollar agreement to build two natural gas pipelines to China from gas fields in Russia's Far East.

But the Russians and Americans are also busy at work. Here's a story from a few days ago:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has invited U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to his private residence in suburban Barvikha for a discussion Tuesday on a broad range of issues in what one senior State Department official called a "relaxed setting."

Issues on the agenda for the two-hour meeting include the next steps on Iran, the Mideast conflict, cooperation on Afghanistan, possible joint work on a missile defense system, Russia's "neighborhood" and climate change.

Talking Points Memo has a set of photos covering Hillary Clinton's trip to Europe and Russia that ought to lay to rest that she's not an active Secretary of State (which was one of those inane stories from a media not paying close attention).

We now live in a turbulent era. In the past, the answer to turbulence was violence. Barack Obama knows this and most foreign leaders know this. No war exemplified such violence more than World War Two. It's not certain that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had much clue about the current era. In many ways, as so often happens with conservatives, they were fighting the battles of the past.

It's hard to believe that officials like Cheney were pursuing policies aimed at nothing else but creating some sort of American empire. The idea of preemptive war, unilateralism and even the notion of nuclear bunker busters that Bush proposed in June 2002 still feels alien to me when I come across the terms. In 2003, it sent a chill down my spine when a Bush official cheered the start of the Iraq War and bragged that 'we' had crossed the Rubicon. And yet, as they did with Reagan, there were right-wingers who felt George W. Bush had not gone far enough. One of those was Dick Cheney, particularly after 2004. It takes my breath away when I recall how much American policy went off the tracks during the Bush presidency.

And still there are right wingers who want more of that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh put himself on the side of the Taliban in denouncing Barack Obama's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. I know for years it has been something of a convention to consider Rush Limbaugh a clown. When he jumps up and down, he certainly looks like one. But he is dangerous. In many ways, most Americans do not share his values, though it should be pointed out that in the early 90s he had a rather large audience. The key to Limbaugh is simple: he is very angry and he wants to dominate. He is a classic example of a very aggressive social dominator.

I bring up Limbaugh because he is good at enabling some Americans to forget the disaster of the Bush years. It should not be controversial news that Bush did enormous damage to our nation. It will take years just to repair the economic damage. During the Bush years, crooks had a field day simply because no one was minding the store. But what did more damage was a business as usual approach by Bush that ignored changing conditions in such areas as energy, the climate, an excessive loss of jobs, stagnant wages, and particularly new financial instruments that greatly aggravated the economic downturn.

In foreign policy, Bush was in Afghanistan for more than seven years. And yet some people seem to have forgotten that Bush should have been out of Afghanistan by the 2004 election. But he was more interested in Iraq and put Afghanistan on a back burner. We are still there and we are tangling with problems that affect not only Afghanistan but Pakistan as well. Now I believe we need to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as we can. But there's a problem and I haven't fully sorted it out yet so I'm not comfortable with arguments from those in a hurry to leave. The problem is Pakistan and the fact that it has nuclear weapons. Here's one story from Islamabad that disturbs me:

Pakistan has sought to protect its nuclear weapons from attack by the Taliban or other militants by storing the warheads, detonators and missiles separately in facilities patrolled by elite troops.

Analysts are divided on how secure these weapons are. Some say the weapons are less secure than they were five years ago, and Saturday's attack would show a "worrisome" overconfidence by the Pakistanis.

While complex security is in place, much depends on the Pakistani army and how vulnerable it is to infiltration by extremists, said a Western government official with access to intelligence on Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Bush and some of his advisers like to point to Pakistan as one of their successes. In reality, they never fully dealt with a wide range of issues. Through incompetence, they nearly encouraged Pakistan to go to war with India back in 2002 (Colin Powell, to his credit, cleaned up the mess).

Of course, stories like this one about the Taliban and al Qaida also concern me:

Pakistan – Teams of gunmen attacked three law enforcement facilities in Pakistan's cultural heart of Lahore on Thursday, killing 18 people in an escalation of audacious terror strikes as the Taliban try to keep the government from waging a planned offensive on the militants.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik vowed not to let the attacks deter the government in its pursuit of Taliban and al Qaida fighters. "The enemy has started a guerrilla war," Malik told a local television station.

Afghanistan is going to require constant reevaluation. Of course, the sooner we can get out the better. But the last thing we need, remote though the chances seemingly are (and are they really that remote?), is to see the Taliban and their friends in al Qaida somehow in control of Pakistan. It's not likely to happen but I for one am cutting Obama some slack until we see a better picture.

In other areas of foreign policy, I see many signs that Obama is moving forward. He is moving away from the unilateralism of Bush and returning to international discussions. We're still the only nation that can truly lead and after eight years of neglect serious and difficult issues are being tackled. Success in many areas are going to be difficult to achieve but that's far better than what we had during the Bush years when so many people in Washington couldn't be bothered to even try.

No one should imagine that Barack Obama can undo all the damage done during the Bush years, but I'm going to make a prediction: when Barack Obama gives his State of the Union in January, many Americans are going to be surprised at the useful things that have been done both domestically and in foreign policy. Of course, we'll still see the same nonsense from the news. One day Obama will be described as all talk and no action. And the next day, pundits will whine that he's doing too much. We're in an era where readers still have to do a certain amount of their own digging.

India and Pakistan

India is about one third the size of the United States and Pakistan is about the size of Texas and Louisiana combined. India is a rapidly emerging economic power and Pakistan is a country with potential but it is having trouble transitioning to the 21st century. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers and for a number of reasons they are also enemies of one another.

Eriposte of The Left Coaster has been doing posts on Pakistan. Today he has a post on the elections in India:

The Indian National Congress (INC), the incumbent ruling party, turned in a strong performance this time despite having severed relationships with some allied parties that helped them form the government in 2004. The INC is now in a much better position to form the new national government with fewer allies, implying that it is likely to be a more sturdy government - which might partly explain the history-making surge of India's stock market in the aftermath of the election results. In my view, this election is significant because this is the first election indicating that the INC has significantly recovered from a historic low in its political fortunes and turned around a long-term secular decline in its performance at the ballot box.

Again, India, despite many significant problems, sounds like a nation moving forward. In an earlier era, India, or any other nation, might have used a terrorist attack, like the one that occurred this winter in Mumbai, as a rationale for launching a war, in this case against Pakistan. That war appears to have been averted and economic progress in India continues.

Not including its troubles with India, Pakistan has been hampered by a number of problems. The long war in Afghanistan during the 1980s put the Soviet on the border with Pakistan. Some millions of refugees escaped into Pakistan into the border areas. Now the United States is in Afghanistan. In a sense, Pakistan has had to deal with the Russians, Americans, Afghans, Indians and others in the last sixty years, not to mention many armed and militant political groups inside the country. Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan is more a loosely controlled territory than a fully integrated part of Pakistan. In a way, the people of the territorial areas have easier access to the modern areas of Pakistan than the people of the modern areas do in the other direction. A curious thing has happened in recent weeks and I honestly don't know what to make of it. The people who rule Pakistan in a strange coalition of elected officials and a quasi-independent military have decided to set aside their quarrels with India (for the moment) to deal with increasing unrest in the territories that is impacting other areas of Pakistan.

In the meantime, other issues about Pakistan can hardly be ignored. The New York Times has this article today:

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Sooner or later, the international community is going to have to do a more effective job of dealing with the increasing complexity of nuclear weapons issues. Cowboy diplomacy, of which George W. Bush was such a famous and dismal practitioner, may, in my opinion, have played a role in Pakistan's rapidly increasing arsenal (caveat: I'm assuming that Congress has been accurately informed). After 9/11, Bush made it clear to other nations that they were either with us or against us. That kind of language was brought strongly to bear on Pakistan. To deal with Afghanistan, we needed Pakistan's cooperation. President Musharraf of Pakistan appears to have had some ultimatum laid down to him to encourage his cooperation. The details are fuzzy but a high stakes bluff seems to have been played. Later Bush made some unfortunate comments to the effect that we would have swept in and taken Pakistan's nuclear weapons if Mushrraf had declined to cooperate with the U.S. I say unfortunate because it was unlikely that such a sweep of Pakistan's nuclear weapons was possible. But if we assume that Pakistan was concerned that such an operation was possible (either by us or by India), the building of more nuclear weapons (and dispersing them) obviously renders what were dismal odds in 2001 to odds that are now nil. Even if I'm reading this wrong, we can be certain of this: Bush's many blunders are still playing out months after his departure and will continue to play out for some years to come.

More Than Five Years Later: Afghanistan

The other war goes on. I've mentioned before that it was reading about Afghanistan that more than anything convinced me that we had no business going to war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan was never finished and there were plenty of early signs that Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration didn't know what they were doing and some early blunders in Afghanistan were the proof. Actually the failure of the senior Bush to address Afghanistan in during his own term in office seems to be the one case where junior copied his father and failed to finish the job he started—before rushing off to a war we did not need.

Here's a story by Guy Kuvnor of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat about Afghanistan and local memories in the US:

Hanifa Anwarzai, a former elementary school teacher in Kabul, remembers Afghanistan at peace.

"The kids would draw pictures of flowers, of beautiful women. Good stuff," said Anwarzai, 57, a Santa Rosa resident and a grandmother.

Soviet forces swept into Afghanistan in 1979, ushering in a nearly 30-year period of war that drove 5 million Afghans - including Anwarzai's family - into exile.

Children saw their fathers slain and the once beautiful schoolroom drawings now depicted "the guns, the tanks, people being killed," Anwarzai said.

She and her husband, Kabir Anwarzai, 65, have never lost their concern for an Afghanistan that quickly dropped from the American consciousness after Sept. 11 and Round 1 of the war on terrorism. With violence and the headlines it generates ratcheting up, the conflict some call a "forgotten war" is coming back into focus.

The U.S. mission, it turns out, was not completely accomplished, and local members of Congress and others are re-engaging their attention on Afghanistan...

(snip)

...as America shifted its forces and fortune to Iraq in 2003, the Taliban and al-Qaida, never eradicated, regrouped in the mountainous tribal area of neighboring Pakistan. Fueled by profits from the world's largest opium trade, discontent among impoverished Afghans and a weak central government in Kabul, the insurgents renewed their aggression.

With the snowbound mountain passes along the border due to clear in a month or two, Afghanistan is bracing for an assault by fundamentalist Muslim insurgents that may be the bloodiest since 2001.

And the war goes on. I give Bush an F in Afghanistan for not finishing the job. I give him an F in Iraq for lying about the war and not having a plan. I give him an F for Iran for not sitting down to talk. I give him a D- for spending five years on North Korea only to end up where Clinton had left things in reasonable shape, though Bush could have improved things if he knew what he was doing. I give him a big F for the strategic damage he has done to our foreign policy worldwide.

But I don't know which is the biggest failure: Bush's foreign policy or the failure of voters to send him home in 2004. If the media had been doing its job back then, our country might already be turning around Bush's failed foreign policy.

More on Cheney's Poor Judgment and al Qaida

The other day, I pointed out that the Bush Administration had al Qaida on the ropes and failed to finish the job in late 2001 and 2002; Cheney's posturing comments against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi avoid the obvious: that Cheney's incompetent policies have done much to enable al Qaida to come back. Truthout has a long article by Robert Parry of Consortium News that explains in much detail why the vice president is so wrong:

Vice President Dick Cheney says he stands by his accusation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would "validate the al-Qaeda strategy." And he apparently thinks he got the better of this latest war of words.

However, if Pelosi ever goes beyond complaining that Cheney is impugning her "patriotism" – while Cheney counters that he is only questioning her "judgment" – she might point out that it is the Bush administration that has "validated" al-Qaeda's 9/11 strategy over the past five years.

Captured al-Qaeda documents reveal that Osama bin Laden's principal goal in the 9/11attacks was to lure the United States into a clumsy counterattack in the Middle East that would alienate Muslims, help al-Qaeda recruit more jihadists and bog down the American military in a no-win war.

Though bin Laden was mistaken in believing that Afghanistan would become the central front, he was right in pretty much every other part of his plan. At the time of 9/11, al-Qaeda was a fringe player in the Muslim world, with its leaders driven into exile and holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan.

I don't agree with everything that Parry says but he adds a number of useful details. There should be no doubt at this late stage of the war that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld are responsible for the fiasco in Iraq, the failure to deal fully with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan by rushing off to Iraq, and subsequently the resurgence of al Qaida.

Strange Days in the Bush Administration

First, the good news. The Bush Administration says it plans to talk to the Syrians and Iranians. Of course, it's good news only if the Bush Administration follows through on its statement, something it has not always done. So we will see if this is real or more nonsense.

Now for the strange news that keeps coming out of Washington:

Recently, we saw the Bush Administration trying to claim some of our troops were being killed by explosive devices made in Iran. What they offered was shaky evidence and the Bush Administration was forced to backpedal, before it was shown the devices were being made in Iraqi workshops as most people assumed all along.

We have the Walter Reed scandal with administration figures saying that no one cares about our wounded soldiers and veterans more than they do though mysteriously their Republican friends in Congress kept failing to provide oversight or money. Alas, it appears to be another heckuva job Brownie moment that has become such a familiar hallmark of this particular presidency.

One of the latest things is the Bush Administration's backpedaling on North Korea's so-called uranium enrichment program, which was always an iffy matter. All along, plutonium, not uranium, appeared to be what the North Koreans were using for their nuclear arms program. And the bomb most likely to fizzle is the plutonium bomb which has to built just right. We are fortunate that Bush is not the only incompetent in world affairs; North Korea called its own bluff and their missiles failed and later their nuclear device failed to make the statement they were hoping for (one suspects they may have known they had a troubled program and picked the bomb most likely to succeed and it wasn't good enough, hence no second try). Bush's many bizarre exaggerations of other nation's arms programs is leading to serious repercussions and makes it more difficult to engage in arms control in the future. We are fortunate that other nations, such as those in Europe, take arms control more seriously in terms of careful monitoring, analysis and diplomacy. At least there are people around who still know what they're doing. But they're certainly rare in the Bush Administration.

But nothing matches the bizarre and strange behavior of Dick Cheney. The more we learn about the arrogant and self-assured Vice President and his delusional assertions, the more evident it becomes that Dick Cheney needs to step down. He blew Iraq. He blew North Korea. Along with Bush and Rumsfeld, he was dead wrong to put Afghanistan on the back burner. But Cheney is itching for action in Iran as if he still retains some credibility.

No one is more the topic of discussion these days than Dick Cheney and much of that discussion has been prompted by Cheney's odd behavior—more prominent lately possibly because of the Scooter Libby trial and Cheney's close connection to the affair. As secretive and low profile as Cheney has been for most of Bush's six years in office, he has been a source of real concern from the beginning when he turned out not to be the steadying hand many people thought he was going to be. Sidney Blumenthal has an article in Salon that focuses on Cheney:

Cheney's implication that the U.S. presence in Iraq cannot possibly be an inspiration for terrorism is simply not shared at the highest levels of the senior military, including commanders on the ground in Iraq. I have learned that they are privately reading, circulating, and in agreement with a new article written by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, senior fellows at the New York University Center on Law and Security. (Bergen is also a fellow at the New America Foundation. For purposes of full disclosure, I am also a senior fellow at the NYU Center.) Their article, "The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide," published in Mother Jones, provides empirical evidence for careful conclusions:

"Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively."

Draining military and economic resources from Afghanistan in the run-up to invading Iraq contributed to Afghanistan's current crisis. While money and materiel were siphoned to Iraq, Afghanistan was starved. "Aid per capita to Afghans in the first two years after the fall of the Taliban was around a tenth of that given to Bosnians following the end of the Balkan civil war in the mid-1990s," Bergen noted in testimony on Feb. 15 before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan James Dobbins has said, "Afghanistan was the least resourced of any major American-led nation building operation since the end of World War II." But the Iraq policy has had other ricochet effects, according to Bergen and Cruickshank:

"Since the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan has suffered 219 jihadist terrorist attacks that can be attributed to a particular group, resulting in the deaths of 802 civilians. The fact that the Taliban only conducted its first terrorist attacks in September 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq, is significant. International forces had already been stationed in the country for two years before the Taliban began to specifically target the U.S.-backed Karzai government and civilians sympathetic to it. This points to a link between events in Iraq and the initiation of the Taliban's terrorist campaign in Afghanistan. True, local dynamics form part of the explanation for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the use of terrorism, particularly suicide attacks, by the Taliban is an innovation drawn from the Iraqi theater."

(snip)

Rather than approaching a climactic struggle against free-floating sects of "Islamofascism," the administration has been a party since Sept. 11 to concrete regional conflicts in which not only were economic, social and diplomatic instruments ignored but international military help was also rejected. Belatedly, in Afghanistan, circumstances of the administration's own making have forced it to concede the necessity of getting assistance from allies. Yet the movement of 1,400 British troops there is a direct reflection of the disintegration of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. Those very troops are being redeployed from southern Iraq, the British sector now being ceded to control of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which Bush's "surge" is supposedly intended to suppress.

To repeat a point I made the other day, the Bush Administration had terrorists and al Qaida knocked back on its heels in the months after 9/11 but by refusing to finish the job in Afghanistan (or deluding themselves that they had done their job despite what a number of terrorist experts were saying), they gave al Qaida a breather. More important, by attacking Iraq with such a fraudelent case for war, a case so fraudelent that it was evident to the whole world—and by allowing such stupid and inflammatory acts as Abu Ghraib—Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld, through their own recklessness and incompetence, breathed new life into al Qaida and several terrorist groups.

On any number of issues, Cheney has some explaining to do. He has been treated, up to now, with far too much deference—and perhaps fear—by the media and generally Republican members of Congress. He is no expert and no visionary. He is a right winger caught in a rigid ideology that belongs in the cocktail lounge of a conservative country club; it is where Cheney belongs—in such an environment he can snarl and sneer all he wants, just so he isn't taken seriously by anyone in government. Congress needs to demand serious answers from Cheney. If answers aren't forthcoming, cut the funding for his office. If that doesn't work, begin impeachment proceedings. What we can no longer afford to do is pretend that Dick Cheney is not a major problem.

Frank Rich on Al Qaida

Iraq didn't have a nuclear program worthy of the name but we attacked anyway. We attacked and Iran decided it might be time to at least pretend to have a nuclear program. We haven't attacked them yet but Cheney is thinking about it while Bush.... handles public relations?

The organization that attacked us on 9/11 was al Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, all of whom were largely in Afghanistan at the time. Osama bin Laden escaped. Into Pakistan. Which has nuclear weapons. Which has a military that may not be totally loyal to President Musharraf. Afghanistan, which seemed to be a winnable war back in late 2001, has been dangerously neglected. The Taliban is threatening to make headway again. Al Qaida, in the meantime, seems to be growing strong again by basing itself across the Afghan border in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, where the Pakistani military refuses to go. And Bush and Cheney are digging a hole in Iraq debating whether to support the Sunnis or the Shiites or some secular coalition that exists only in their imagination. We have a problem.

Frank Rich of The New York Times has an article on the serious potential threat of a regrouped al Qaida (via Truthout):

The White House doesn't want to hear it.... That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" ... Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq "surge" is as much a sideshow as Britney's scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what's going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war's critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. ...

(snip)

... It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn't used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: "Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is." It's typical of Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. ...

I'm not sure what to make of Scheuer's statements, but there is this to consider: Bush and Cheney have bluffed and lied and bluffed again so often in the last five years that they can't even keep track of the consequences and permutations anymore. In foreign policy, you don't bluff unless you know exactly what you're doing; that does not describe George W. Bush or Dick Cheney this late in the day. Some potentially dangerous bluffs have been called. I won't say which ones though some of the more obvious ones are apparent to most people. The incompetence and ideological recklessness of Bush and Cheney is clearly endangering the United States.

We have a choice: we either regroup and begin serious talks with our enemies and friends in the Middle East or we drift into wider wars necessitating a draft and the neglect of any real future for years to come. Bush and Cheney, as things now stand, are on a slippery slope that may lead to a greater disaster of their own making in two or three trouble spots in the Middle East. And they have neglected al Qaida, to our nation's peril. Bush and Cheney have shown us how not to fight the 'war on terror.'

British Military Overstretched

Thanks to mishandling by Bush, Cheney and the fired Rumsfeld, we are at risk of losing two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. Dick Cheney seems to be itching for a third war, this one with Iran, without bothering to engage in serious diplomacy. The Bush Administration and its neoconservative allies never understood the job, the Iraqi people or the military requirements. Clearly, we never sent enough troops to stabilize Iraq and we put Afghanistan on the back burner far longer than we should have instead of finishing the job. I have said this any number of times.

Cheney is being fraudelent when he says the war is going so well that the British can send troops home. If Bush is to have any chance of getting his foreign policy under control, he needs to urge Cheney to resign or, at the very least, cut back the vice president's portfolio so that he'll no longer create problems with his strange right wing ideology. The British are now in a position where they essentially are overstretched. Here's the story from Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times:

Britain's decision to pull 1,600 troops out of Iraq by spring, touted by U.S. and British leaders as a turning point in Iraqi sovereignty, was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The British military is approaching "operational failure," former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

"Because the British army is in essence fighting a far more intensive counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, there's been a realization that there has to be some sort of transfer of resources from Iraq to Afghanistan," said Clive Jones, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Leeds, who has closely followed Britain's Iraq deployment.

"It's either that, or you risk in some ways losing both," he said. "It's the classic case of 'Let's declare victory and get out.' "

What is happening to the British is exactly what a number of American generals have warned could happen to us. In Iraq, we don't have enough people, we don't have enough equipment, training is seriously beginning to slip and we have people in the Bush Administration who still don't know what they're doing. The reality is that the United States never fully mobilized for the war Dick Cheney and George W. Bush had in mind; the job of civilians, apparently, was to go about their business and, by the way, go shopping.

Even if we manage to stabilize Iraq and Bush calls that a victory, we have lost far more than anything we have gained. There have been some calls lately to make sure the job in Afghanistan is finished. Al Qaida is making a comeback along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. It's time to get out of the middle of a civil war in Iraq, leave forces nearby and concentrate on finishing the neglected job in Afghanistan.


Note: The LA Times article has a mildly misleading graph from the Brookings Institute. It gives the impression there were fewer coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 than there actually were, though by the end of 2003, coalition forces had dropped considerably in numbers. It should be noted that the British alone had at least 40,000 troops in Iraq at the beginning of the war.

Iraqi Refugees

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, more than 5.5 million refugees left the country. As of 2004, only 3.5 million Afghan refugees had returned home. We are rapidly creating the same conditions in Iraq and producing enormous strains on the surrounding countries (that alone is good reason why we need to have regional talks). With the latest on the Iraqi refugee situation is Warren P. Strobel of the McClatchy Washington Bureau:

One out of every seven Iraqis has fled his or her home or sought refuge abroad, the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948, according to United Nations officials and relief workers. Every day, violence displaces an estimated 1,300 more Iraqis in the country; every month, at least 40,000.

(snip)

On Monday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of a high-level State Department task force on the refugee issue. State Department officials said the Bush administration will expand the number of refugees it allows into the U.S., with special attention given to Iraqis who may be at risk because they worked for the U.S. government. But the administration would admit only 20,000 Iraqis at most this year.

In his just-released budget, President Bush asked for $35 million to help Iraq's refugees in fiscal year 2008, plus $15 million in supplemental funding for this year.

(snip)

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report last month that there are as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, primarily in Syria and Jordan. Another 1.7 million people are displaced within Iraq, the UNHCR said.

Refugees started fleeing Iraq several years ago and Condi Rice is just now creating a task force. That's par for the Bush Administration. At any time in at least the last four years, the Republicans in Congress could have raised the issue and they did not. That too is par for this generation of Republican conservatives in Washington.

The amount that Bush is allocating for Iraqi refugees is a pitiful drop in the bucket for addressing 2 million refugees outside the country and 1.7 million inside the country. This is a mess he created; he needs to acknowledge it and he needs to deal with it.

There are important lessons from the recent past. A large part of the current mess in Afghanistan was a product of essentially allowing the Afghans to do our fighting against the Soviet Union and then abandoning them after their country was ruined. It's true that during the 1980s we gave the Afghans weapons but we did little else. When the Soviet Union left, we could have done much to stabilize the country without having to send troops, but George H. W. Bush chose to do nothing. I regard the senior Bush as the better president in the Bush family but he was not without his shortcomings and the neglect of Aghanistan may have been his biggest blunder (and not the so-called failure to remove Saddam Hussein in 1991—the senior Bush and his advisers correctly read the high cost of that scenario). There should be no doubt left that Iraq is in a civil war and that the refugee crisis will only grow. George W. Bush needs to do more than keep changing the subject.

Bush Administration Fiasco Continues

Remember Afghanistan? The place where Osama bin Laden and al Qaida were located? Because of the fiasco in Iraq, Bush never got around to finishing the job in Afghanistan, a war clearly related to the 9/11 terrorists. Steve Clemons notes where some of the troops for the Bush 'surge' are coming from:

Bush Makes Same Mistake Twice: Pulling Troops from Afghanistan to Deploy to Iraq

President Bush is planning to pull troops out of Afghanistan to deploy to Iraq.

From the Baltimore Sun:

As a last-ditch effort, President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure, an order that Pentagon officials say would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they struggle to man both wars.

Already, a U.S. Army infantry battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks in order to deploy to Iraq.

Read the Baltimore Sun article and ask yourself if the president really knows what he's doing.

My grandfather said once that if you're going to do a job, do it right. One time, he amplified on the theme and said you don't do a job halfway and then rush off to do a job somewhere else; you finish the job you started and then you move on. My grandfather was a Republican and he had far more sense than the current Republican in the White House.

We don't need more troops in Iraq at this point, we need a political settlement, a drawdown and a redeployment. The 'troop surge' ignores the need for a more sensible direction in Iraq. There are no good solutions in Iraq but it is becoming increasingly important to repair our foreign policy.

The president has two wars going and neither are going all that well. The problem in Afghanistan is more a matter of neglect. Iraq, however, is a strategic blunder. And Wednesday night, Bush hinted at possible war with Syria and Iran. The president isn't merely incompetent, he is out of control. I don't know what's going to happen but there are growing signs that a number of Republicans in Congress are finally realizing that the guys in the White House need to be reined in.

The Forgotten War in Afghanistan

The unfinished war in Afghanistan continues. The name of Osama bin Laden is sometimes trotted out by the Bush Administration for political purposes but the hunt for him has largely languished. If he's across the border in Pakistan, and that seems likely, there is little interest in the Pakistani government in pursuing him. The perpetrator of 9/11 remains at large. In a twist of fate, though he had nothing to do with 9/11, Saddam Hussein will be executed within 30 days for other crimes, and the civil war and insurgency in Iraq will continue, if not worsen. But Iraq is the strange war we did not need. In a real sense, the death of more than 600,000 Iraqis and more than 3,000 American soldiers and contractors is a steep price to pay for the execution of Saddam Hussein.

But I was talking about Afghanistan. You don't hear much about Afghanistan on the nightly news. It is the forgotten war. Here's a story by Nick Allen in the Daily India, of all places:

As winter grips Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan, US troops and Taliban and other insurgents are winding down after a year of fierce but inconclusive fighting in a barren swathe of Central Asia where everything has still to be won.

The first December snow brought a lull in the constant skirmishes, roadside bomb and suicide attacks and rocket strikes against the Bermel base by the border with Pakistan, where soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division will ship out next month after a gruelling 12-month tour.

(snip)

While Pakistan's leadership stresses its commitment to the war on terror, US officers feel not enough is being done there to suppress the Taliban, and claim the insurgents sometimes even receive help from Pakistani units along the porous 2,500 km border.

'We don't really trust the Pakistani military too much,' said Captain Jason Dye, the commander at Bermel.

Frustration is evident in the ranks.

In early late 2001, Afghanistan was clearly a winnable war. Most Afghans seemed tired of the Taliban, or at least tired of twenty years of war, a period that began with the invasion by the Soviet Union in its last throes of power. When the Americans first arrived, things looked promising. But the war continues largely due to neglect by the Bush Administration as their interest turned to an unneeded war in Iraq. I have sympathy for the Afghans and for Americans halfway around the world.

David Ignatius of The Washington Post has written an article about Bush that seems designed to evoke sympathy for the president. Given how much of our policies in the last six years have been steeped in arrogance and deception, I find it hard to feel that sympathy. The sympathy that Ignatius seems to feel should be directed elsewhere.