The U.S. government wants your sons and daughters to kill and be killed for this: Hamid Karzai signs law ‘legalising rape in marriage’ President Hamid Karzai has signed a law the UN says legalises rape in marriage and prevents women from leaving the house without permission. Let’s not pretend that the war in Afghanistan is [...]
Archive for March, 2009
The Rule of the Rapists, Continued
Posted: March 31, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Karzai
5
Q: Where are the Americans Against Escalation in Iraq folks on Afghanistan?
Posted: March 30, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, Democrats, Obama
A: On Obama’s staff: CAP and the five million member liberal lobby group MoveOn were behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war. [...]
Juan Cole: Obama on Afghanistan “Differs Little” from McCain, Cheney on Iraq
Posted: March 30, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Juan Cole, Obama
Mid-East expert Juan Cole penned an excellent piece for Salon debunking the President’s rationale for escalation: Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating [...]
Administration Gets Afghanistan Wrong
Posted: March 27, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan escalation, escalation, Obama
We needed a game-changer in Afghanistan. The plan delivered by the new administration is not it. The most important and destructive deficiency of the new plan is its willful ignorance of the bad effects of flooding Afghanistan with more foreign troops. For months, experts ranging from Richard Barrett (the UN’s al-Qaida/Taliban expert) to Gilles Dorronsoro [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 6: Pakistan
Posted: March 26, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, COIN, counterinsurgency, India, nuclear weapons, Obama, Pakistan, Pashtun
Carve this in stone: the first rule in Afghanistan should be, “Do no harm in Pakistan.” The second rule in Afghanistan should be, “If the solution to your problem is ‘fixing’ Pakistan, you’re screwed.” Earlier in this series, we dealt with counterinsurgency doctrine’s assumption of a self-contained battle space. We saw how U.S. attempts to [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 5: Iran
Posted: March 25, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghan National Army, Afghanistan, ANA, COIN, counterinsurgency, Iran, ISAF, Obama
Flooding any area with large numbers of armed people will always have larger ramifications than just the security implications in the immediate area. In Afghanistan, we have to look to the borders, to Pakistan and to Iran, to understand the implications of an escalation. In both cases, escalation poses grave risks for U.S. interests. Let’s [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Coda: Remembering Oscar Romero
Posted: March 25, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: COIN, counterinsurgency, El Salvador, Romero
Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero. Romero was killed by “counterinsurgents” backed by the U.S. government. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual still cites the Salvadoran counterinsurgency as an example of success, despite the “30,000 politically motivated killings between October 15th 1979 and December 1981.” …Preachers and teachers know very [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 4: Arming the Corrupt Border Police
Posted: March 25, 2009 in UncategorizedTags: Afghan Border Police, Afghanistan, Blackwater, COIN, Congressional Research Service, counterinsurgency, DynCorp
In my first post in this series, I briefly mentioned the idea of a “seal,” i.e. a frontier that blocks the counterinsurgent’s opponents from escaping U.S. firepower and establishing a safe haven. The counterinsurgent wants to trap the opponent in a given geographic area and then convince the local population to expel them into the [...]
Drop Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Part 3: Massive COIN Deployments Will Damage Our Economy
Posted: March 24, 2009 in UncategorizedCounterinsurgency will require expenditures that damage our economy at a time when the U.S. can least afford it. As I’ve written elsewhere, executing a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan will require massive amounts of troops: anywhere from 204,600 to 654,767 troops, depending on how badly we want to fudge the numbers. This is problematic on several [...]
