It's good to be back....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

Former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of The Future of Political Islam
Posted: May 10, 2009 03:41 PM

Obama's Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

For all the talk of "smart power," President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

-- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

-- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The "Durand Line" is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan's 28 million Pashtuns.

-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.

-- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

-- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

-- The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible -- with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives -- to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

-- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

-- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that -- something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule -- not what Pakistan needs -- will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad's basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education -- areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

(C) 2009 GLOBAL VIEWPOINT NETWORK; (TM) TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

meanwhile i'm sure happy my one man daily newspaper is back on duty!

In tort law (and other areas) there's a notion 'assumption of risk'. It's a fairly straightforward concept. I would say for journalists or tourists (and their families) who decide to venture into North Korea or Iran that your actions fall under this concept, and we will not pay ransom, political, monetary, or otherwise to secure their release. What will leftist supporters of this policy tell the families of the next people who get snatched by these regimes? Do you think Obama's handling of the Saberi hostage situation encouraged or discouraged Iran from recently taking the 3 American tourists hostage? What should supporters like yourself tell their families?

As for Afghanistan; it's a mess, and the problem is the left is so invested in the notion that Afghanistan is the 'good war' that would have been so easy if we hadn't 'taken our eyes off the ball' by going into Iraq, we may end up getting stuck in a real quagmire for a decade or more.

I would say for journalists or tourists (and their families) who decide to venture into North Korea or Iran that your actions fall under this concept, and we will not pay ransom, political, monetary, or otherwise to secure their release. What will leftist supporters of this policy tell the families of the next people who get snatched by these regimes?

I don't feel like a leftist but I have the idea you'd give me that label.

I say it's a complicated issue. On the one hand, if we send spies into dangerous places and the spies pretend they're tourists and then they get caught, we have some kind of obligation to them. We want them back.

But if we bargain for our spies but we leave the actual tourists and journalists to rot, that tells the enemy which ones are spies if they weren't sure. That isn't good either.

We could eliminate this problem if we never sent in spies posing as tourists or journalists. Or maybe we could hire british or canadian or australian spies to pose as tourists and journalists. Then if they get caught it isn't our problem. We can reward britain etc to do something about it, but we don't have an excuse to officially intervene.

It probably wouldn't be a good idea to grab some iranians in the USA and offer to trade. Iranian politics is pretty murky, you can't tell the players without a scorecard. We might accidentally grab people they want to get back for execution. Or people they're happier to have in US custody than running around loose.

I don't see any good general solutions. But it isn't going to be a whole lot of people. If they start picking up too many tourists or journalists then many fewer americans will visit them. A self-limiting problem. So just do something and then move on to more important issues.

Cornering the afghan opium market would have huge and untold ripples, especially in Iran. Iranian youth is largely unemployed and there is a huge opium and heroin problem, this could mobilize the youth against the government (the give us our smack back movement) OR equally as likely after the youth gets clean due to a lack of the drug, turns in the sinner to saint dynamic, become puritanical and even more supportive of the regime.
I'm not sure which is more unstable, a protesting youth overthrowing the government for smack or an even more galvanized and loyal Iranian state willing to die for their country's nuclear program.

The metaphor was kind of ridiculous from the beginning, but continuing --

how about if this particular tarpaper shack is one of dozens that the murderer could shelter in, depending on how well he gets along with the other users.

And there are multiple murderers and potential murderers who all would like to kill you and me, and any of them might use tarpaper shack resources when they aren't stealing or renting tuxedoes or business suits to get into fancy balls to murder people.

Maybe rather than guard one shack we could find a way to get the various inhabitants of the various shacks to turn away murderers? Or we could burn them all down....

Or maybe the important thing is not so much what the murderers do while they're hiding in tarpaper shacks. Maybe we need to be ready to deal with them when they sneak into our own places. Since it will be very hard to get rid of them all, and besides they probably don't get their best training at sneaking into ritzy places and doing sabotage etc while they're hiding in tarpaper shacks. That isn't the best environment for that training....

So, for example, AQ trained a great many infantrymen. Afghanistan was a fine place to do that. They also trained a much smaller number of spies and saboteurs who were supposed to travel inconspicuously through western society. If those guys ever got sent to afghanistan it was because of a security lapse. They had no business going there.