No Blackwater firm in Pakistan, asserts US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson

The US ambassador in Pakistan Anne W. Patterson Wednesday ruled out the presence of private US security firm Blackwater, adding the US officials and programs in Pakistan are solely aimed at serving people and Government of Pakistan.

According to a statement issued from the US embassy, she said there is no secret operating base in Karachi or anywhere in Pakistan nor are US troops of any command busy with any secret activity in the country.

An article in a US magazine alleging Washington's collusion with Blackwater or any other contracting firm were equally baseless and false, the embassy said.

"US government programs for Pakistan are open and transparent and function in partnership with the government of Pakistan," Ambassador Anne W. Patterson said in the statement.

"US personnel and programs in Pakistan have only one purpose - to assist the government and people of Pakistan as they face the complex challenges confronting their nation," she added.

India planning limited war against Pakistan

India is planning to launch a limited war against Pakistan, the Foreign Office said on Tuesday.

The FO’s statement follows Indian Army chief General Deepak Kapoor’s address during a defence seminar, where he said the possibility of a limited nuclear war was “very much a reality in South Asia”. “India has long been working on the so-called ‘Cold Start’ strategy and preparing for a limited war against Pakistan. General Kapoor’s statement confirms the hegemonic thrust of India’s nuclear doctrine,” Foreign Office spokesperson Abdul Basit said. He said Kapoor’s remarks only reaffirmed India’s dangerous and offensive nuclear designs.

Basit said the international community should take notice of the remarks and India’s long-term intentions, adding that major powers had a particular responsibility in this regard, and should ask India to refrain from steps that could affect the strategic balance in South Asia.

The Foreign Office said Pakistan was fully capable of safeguarding its national sovereignty and defending its borders. “As a responsible country, we will continue promoting peace and stability in South Asia on the basis of equality and mutual respect,” he said.

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan : Jeremy Scahill Reveals

For months we've been reading slightly condescending English-language news reports about how Pakistanis believe the private security firm is operating with impunity in their country. Well guess what? Jeremy Scahill reports in the Nation that Blackwater is indeed operating on behalf of the U.S. in Pakistan. Blackwater personnel are reportedly doing "snatch and grab" assassinations in the unstable country
EXPECT DELAYS - Iraq's presidential election, scheduled for January, will almost certainly be delayed. The Iraqi Parliament disregarded a veto by one of Iraq's vice presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, and passed some new amendments to a recently passed election law. The vice president promises to veto those, too. This time, Parliament doesn't seem to have the 60 percent majority necessary to override the vice presidential veto. American and UN diplomats tried unsuccessfully to broker a compromise that would satisfy al-Hashimi.
The White House announced that the U.S. will reveal an emissions reduction target before next month's Copenhagen summit. The target is expected to be in line with that outlined in climate legislation before the Senate--a 17-20% reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. The European Union has pledged to cut 20% over the same period, or 30% as part of a global deal
After years of delays, the UK is launching an official inquiry into the country's decision to join the Iraq war in 2003. The inquiry is expected to last 18 months. Key figures, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, are slated to testify. On Tuesday, the committee heard from high-ranking officials who said that their counterparts in Washington were talking about "regime change" as early as 2001.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon offered his condolences to the family of a UN staffer whose remains were recently discovered in Lebanon. The staffer, Alec Collett, was abducted near the Beirut Airport in 1985. At the time of his disappearance, Collett was a former British journalist on assignment with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
"Adam Serwer demolishes a talking point: What the articles on the subject all seem to omit is that there will be no TV cameras in the courtroom for this trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s rants will be available only by transcript." Now, I tend to think a KSM rant would redound, overall, to the U.S.’s benefit, so I’m somewhat disappointed by this news. But no one should report that there’s going to be some kind of game-changing harangue from KSM when it’s not even going to be televised. Even beyond that, think about it for a second. Usama bin Laden has issued over 10 years’ worth of videoed anti-American rants....Yet al-Qaeda remains a potent-but-marginal phenomenon in the Muslim world. There is nothing, at all, that KSM could say in court that could change that fact. And still this demagogic and ignorant point is taken seriously in the media. "
The American Bar Association's new president has ties to some of the world's most repressive leaders. "Defending Liberty, Pursuing Justice" is the motto of the American Bar Association, and among the association's four stated goals, one is to "advance the rule of law." [...] Nonetheless, it is true: Carolyn Lamm, a D.C.-based corporate attorney who was named ABA president in August, has registered as a lobbyist in the past for such authoritarian states as Libya and Zaire. "
An Ontario court judge will soon decide if Canada’s prostitution laws should be struck down. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court will decide if laws prohibiting polygamy can still be enforced. And in the House of Commons, a private member’s bill would make it legal for the profoundly ill to seek a doctor’s help to commit suicide. As a nation we are reinventing, refining—or undermining—our morality in dramatic fashion. In some instances we are asking the courts to do our thinking for us. But in most cases we forge a national sense of right or wrong in the millions of individual judgment calls we make every day—increasingly without the guidance of organized religion. "

Dances with warlords. Afghan President Hamid Karzai invited two key allies to his inaugural gala: U.S. Secretary of State Hilllary Clinton and notorious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostum, then a key U.S. ally in the fight to overthrow the Taliban, was in charge of about 2000 prisoners who suffocated in shipping containers in 2001. He returned from exile in Turkey earlier this year to help Karzai win the election.

Yousuf Raza Gilani has apologised for neglecting the Balochistan

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has apologised for neglecting the Balochistan in the past.
The Prime Minister was addressing inaugural of the joint session of the parliament, summoned by President Asif Ali Zardari under article 54(1) of the constitution. The joint session of the parliament has been summoned for approval of Balochistan package.
Gilani said that Balochistan will be provided economic and constitutional rights, adding that efforts are underway to win hearts of Balochistan people.
He also said that govt is ready to hold talks with Balochistan nationalist parties.
Meanwhile, Senator Raza Rabbani while presenting the draft of Balochistan package said that FC will replace army in Sui on the demand of Baloch leaders, no more cantonments will be set up in the province, all political prisoners including their leaders will be released but dialogues will not be held with those involved in terrorist activities.
Raza Rabbani further said that all the stakeholders will be taken on board.
All operations will be halted except war against terror.

Iranian war games

Iranian armed forces on Monday continued the country's large-scale air defence war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack, state TV reported

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan

By Jeremy Scahill

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.
The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services." The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."
A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.
His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."
"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."
The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi
The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."
Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.
The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask.
According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."
The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."
In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"
Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze
Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."
The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.
A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The Nation.
According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.
For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.
According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."
The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."
In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."
Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?
Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.
In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.
The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."
The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."
The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"
In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.
Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."
JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force
Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."
From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.
Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."
"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."
While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."
Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."
Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."
As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.
The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"
The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."
Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan
For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.
The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."
Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."
In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."
The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large gated community established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.
The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."
If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."

About Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program 

 

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List of NRO Beneficiaries

List of NRO Beneficiaries

India’s Blame Game Revisited

By: Fatima Syed

Recently, India's Home Minister Chidambaram gave a statement that India would retaliate strongly to Pakistan-backed terrorism. He said, “If terrorists and militants from Pakistan try to carry out any attacks in India, they will not only be defeated but will be retaliated very strongly”. He said he has been warning Pakistan not to play with India and that the Mumbai attacks should be the "last game". Contrary to the statement of Indian Home Minister, it is the Indian soil which is being continuously used for subversive activities against neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and China etc. No wonder New Delhi is facing some serious security threats but from within. These problems and threats are of absolutely indigenous nature. India is facing Naxal menace, which according to the Indian Prime Minister is the biggest threat to country’s security.  Similarly, the turmoil in the Northeastern states is also a result of Indian Governments’ inability to address their grievances. India is also facing communal violence perpetrated by Hindu extremists, having patronage of Indian government. The demolition of Babri Mosque, Gujarat pogrom and burning of Samjhota Express are few examples in which Hindu extremists butchered Muslims with complete impunity.

Being the traditional enemy, India always tried to create chaos in Pakistan and RAW performs this duty very efficiently. Since its inception, RAW tried in one way or the other to destabilize Pakistan. After East Pakistan started demanding autonomy from 1969 onwards, RAW extended open and full cooperation to the movement leading to the dismemberment of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh. In fact, this was more a war between India and Pakistan rather than the movement of autonomy. After the separation of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi delivered a speech at New Delhi Ground in which she mocked the Two Nations Theory by saying, “Today ‘WE’ have taken the revenge of the one thousand years’ slavery and the birth of Bangladesh is the death of Two Nations Theory.”

India is engaged in creating disturbance in Pakistan. It currently has an extensive diplomatic presence in Afghanistan. It includes the Indian embassy in Kabul and four consulates in Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. These Indian diplomatic missions serve as launching pads for undertaking covert operations against Pakistan from Afghan soil. Particularly, the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad and their embassy in Kabul are used for clandestine activities inside Pakistan in general and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Baluchistan in particular. Indian consulates in Afghanistan are printing fake Pakistani currency, using it to recruit poverty-stricken Afghans to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism on Pakistani territory. A senior official in Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said that, “Pakistan very much wants a stable Afghanistan, because they are next to us, and any instability up there will leak into Pakistan but as for the Indians, we told Afghanistan that the only purpose of opening those consulates is cross border terrorism into Pakistan”. India is using Afghanistan as the launching base for ‘proxy war’ and is constantly encouraging and promoting activities detrimental to Pakistan.

India is continuously interfering into the internal affairs of Bangladesh.  She is supporting the Chakma refugees of Bangladesh in order to create unrest in that country. Her expansionist design intends to merge the whole Bangladesh into Indian Territory. For this purpose India is supporting many separatist groups and fifth columnists for covert and overt operations. Tracts of Bangladeshi territories are in forced possession of India. She presently occupies 110 enclaves of Bangladesh. Human Rights Congress of Bangladeshi Minorities (HRCBM), a Hindu organization is creating communal violence in Bangladesh. It is facilitating the settlement of Hindus in border districts of the country in order to facilitate Indian annexation of border territory of Bangladesh. The area identified is about 30% border territory of Bangladesh and has been named a Bango Bhumi to be annexed with India. Economic growth of Bangladesh has been hampered due to excessive penetration of Indian smuggled goods into the markets of Bangladesh. Indian intelligence agencies have also flooded Bangladesh with fake paper money to ruin its economy.

Apart from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are also the victims of RAW’s wicked designs. India engineered internal strife and conflicts in Nepal through RAW to destabilize the successive legitimate governments and prop up puppet regimes which would be more amenable to Indian machinations. India is creating problems in Terai area through armed groups who are now openly talking of a separate Madhesi State. A regional party named Terai Madhesh Loktantsrik Party (TMLP) has been launched in Terai area. Reportedly, the party is fully backed by India. India is critical of the working of United Nations Mission (UNMN) in Nepal, which is working in Nepal since January 2007 to monitor the cease fire between Army and Maoists. UNMN has been able to find out Indian involvement into the internal affairs of Nepal.

In Sri Lanka RAW created and supported Tamil Tigers. On the Mukti Bahini model, RAW built up terrorist training camps in Tamil Nadu for a number of Tamil terrorist organizations. The militants trained in India sidelined the moderate Tamils and started demanding complete independence. The Indian diplomat G. Parathasarathy admitted supporting terrorism in Sri Lanka. “We have learnt our lesson” for backing the terrorist and that “India paid it price for backing the LTTE“. The former Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, J.N. Dixit even accused RAW of having given Rs. five crore to the LTTE.

Indian interference in China is stimulated by different factors. First, its growing economy is becoming a challenge for India. India wants to damage foreign trade of China and for this purpose it is maligning China internationally as a violator of human rights. Secondly, India never took China as a friend; in 1998 it conducted nuclear tests and claimed that its nuclear programme was not Pakistan but China centric. India at the moment is illegally capturing 90,000 sq km area of China. Similarly, both Indian media and intelligentsia are claiming Indian right over Tibet by saying that it is a part of Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. India is supporting Dalai clique, which is demanding the separation of Tibet from China. India has provided political asylum to Dalai Lama, political and spiritual leader of Tibetans, in 1959 and allowed him to run a Tibetan government in exile in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh. Dalai Lama once said, “We regard India as a guru and consider ourselves disciples of India”.

India, which is in habit of blaming others for all its wrongs most of the time forgets that it has many elements on its soil which are creating terrorism. In most of the subversive activities on Indian soil the Hindu extremist groups are involved. They executed such activities sometimes to have an excuse to start backlash against Muslims and sometimes to inflict harm upon Muslims and damage to their properties and belongings. Despite knowing the involvement of Hindu fanatics in most terrorist acts the Indian government is in habit of blaming Lashkar-i-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Indian Muslims and Pakistan for every subversive activity. This is just like deliberately closing ones eyes and ignoring the facts.  There are several incidents in which the Indian government readily put the blame on Indian Muslims and Pakistan such as Sabarmati Express incident, Malegaon Blasts and Samjhota Express explosion. It was, however, cleared afterwards that Hindu extremist groups have had a hand in all these events as the style of execution was much similar. In its well known way, India is double crossing its neighbours and leaving no stone unturned to expand beyond its territory. In order to understand the Indian political objectives one has to recall childhood story of the wolf and the lamb. Just like wolf, India on the basis of lame-excuses and absurd reasons trying to eat up the small neighbouring states. After all this is the only way a Greater India can emerge on the map of the world. 

Express Exclusive:Babri demolition meticulously planned, says Liberhan, indicts Atal with Advani and Joshi

Express Exclusive:Babri demolition meticulously planned, says Liberhan, indicts Atal with Advani and Joshi

How to Get Out of Afghanistan

By William Polk

Mr. Polk was the member of the U.S. Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East from 1961 to 1965. Subsequently, he was professor of history and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago and later president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Author of many books on international affairs, world and Middle Eastern history, he is the author of Understanding Iraq (HarperCollins, New York and London 2005 and 2006) and, together with former Senator George McGovern, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006).

In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads.  President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead.  The choices are expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices.
The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing.  That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a cost of roughly $2,000 a day per person.1   Let us be clear, we now actually have a total complement of over 120,000 people on the public payroll at an overall cost of roughly $100 billion a year.  We can project a loss of a few hundred American soldiers a year and several thousand wounded.   Our senior commander in the Central Command, General David Petraeus, tells us that we cannot win that war.
The second possible road ahead would involve adding substantial numbers of new troops.  In General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, the accepted ratio  of soldiers to natives is 20 to 25 per thousand.2   (The current ratio is 1 to 430.3)  Afghanistan today is a country of about 33 million.   Even if we discount the population to the target group of Pashtuns, we will must deal with 15 or so million people.  So when he and General Stanley McChrystal ask for 40,000, it can only be a first installment.  Soon --  as the generals did in Vietnam4 – they will have to ask for another increment and then another, moving toward the supposedly winning number of between 600,000 and 1.3 million.  That is just the soldiers.  Each soldier is now matched by a supporter,5 rather like medieval armies had flocks of camp followers, so those numbers will roughly double.  Thus, over ten years, a figure often cited,6 or 40 years, which some of the leading neoconservatives have suggested, pretty soon, as they say in Congress, it would involve “talking about real money.”7  In addition to the Congressionally-allocated outlay, the overall cost to our economy has not yet been summed up, but by analogy to the Iraq war, it will probably amount to upwards of $6 trillion.8
Then there are the casualties:  we have so far lost about a thousand -- or a quarter as many as in Iraq.   Casualties we can count, but the number of seriously wounded keeps growing because many of the effects of exposure to modern weapons do not show up until later.   We have no reliable figures yet on Afghanistan, but already about one in four soldiers have reported “acute stress, depression or anxiety.”9  In Iraq at least 100,000 of the one and a half million soldiers who served there suffered severe psychological damage and about 300,000 have reported post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have suffered brain injuries.10 Crassly put, these “walking wounded” will not only be unable fully to contribute to American society but will be a burden on it for many years to come. It has been estimated that dealing with a brain-injured soldier over his remaining life will cost about $5 million.  Cancer, from exposure to depleted uranium is, only now coming into full effect.11 It is sobering that 40 percent of the soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf war – which lasted only a hundred hours – are receiving disability payments.12  Inevitably, more “boots on the ground” will lead to more beds in hospitals.
General McChrystal has told us that we must have large numbers of additional troops to hold the territory we “clear.”  He echoes what the Russian commanders told the Politburo:  in a report on November 13, 1986, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev commented that the Russians attempted the same counterinsurgency strategy but admitted that it failed.  “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan,” he said, “that has not been occupied by one of or soldiers at some time or another.  Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists.  We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize…Without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”
The Russian army fought a bloody, brutal campaign, using every trick or tool  of counterinsurgency ever identified.  The Russians killed a million Afghanis and turned about 5 million into refugees, but after a decade during which they lost 15,000 soldiers and virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union, they gave up and left.  General McChrystal says winning may take him a decade or more to “win.”  But what “winning” means is unclear.13
The senior Russian general, Boris Gromov, opined that “It has been and always will be impossible to solve political problems using force.”  Oddly, in at least some of his statements, General David Petraeus said much the same: “You cannot kill your way out of an insurgency.”14
Third, we could  marginally increase our troop strength.  That is,  adding only between 10,000 and 30,000 troops and a comparable number of mercenaries.  Not the full complement that General McChrystal has now demanded. This road, according to Petraeus, McChrystal and their acolytes would lead to “mission failure.”15 
Not meeting the generals’ demands also brings forward the danger to the Obama administration of being charged with putting our soldiers at risk “with one hand tied behind their backs,”  a phrase from the acrimonious aftermath of the Vietnam war which even General James Jones, President Obama’s director of the National Security Council,  has recently repeated.16   The potential ugly campaign, against which even Henry Kissinger has warned us,17  could pose risks to our political culture -- and even to our legal structure:  some military men are already talking about their restiveness in obeying civilian government.   “You kind of get used to it after years of service” one Army general said at a convention in Washington last month.  Forgetting the constitution, he continued, “We tend to live with it.”  Maybe they will or maybe anger will be channeled into a further extension of the military into politics,  intelligence and diplomacy. 
For the first time that I know of in recent American history, the uniformed military have created what amounts to a pressure group of their own.  Generals Petraeus and McChrystal are the leaders but, by influencing or controlling promotions panels,  they have fostered the advancement of middle grade and junior officers who agree with them.  Some have been brought into a  group called “the Colonels’ Council.”  They have participated in what Andrew Bacevich has called a “quasi-coup.  A small group of individuals, none of them elected or holding appointed office, had joined forces with military dissidents to engineer a change in policy.  Those with statutory responsibility for providing military advice to the president were sidelined.  It was an impressive achievement, but its implications are troubling.  If [retired General Jack] Keane’s manoeuvre proves a precedent, the chain of command will cease to exist.”18  And numbers of retired senior officers have joined not only in what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” but have become the opinion-makers on foreign policy in the media.  Private soldiers and non-commissioned officers have, at the same time, become a major component of the private armies of such groups as Blackwater and form an active part of the constituency of the right wing of the Republican Party.
In the dangerous months and years ahead, if this road is taken, we are apt to hear echoes – particularly in the  next presidential election --of the post Vietnam rhetoric that the civilians sold out the military. In short, while this option sounds moderate and “business-like” I believe that it is the worst option for President Obama and, more importantly, for the nation.
Or,  fourth, we  could  Get out. 
Getting Out
Since General Stanley McChrystal has been quoted as saying “that no alternatives had been offered besides ‘the helicopter on the roof of the embassy’,”19  an allusion to what happened in Vietnam when policy was not formulated or carried out in a rational and timely way,  I will now describe how a rational and timely policy could be effected.  In doing this, I want to emphasize that I learned as an official policy planner that a plan is of little value unless it incorporates elements that would make it

• attractive or at least politically feasible for a president;
•  foresees a specified allocation of funds to effect it;
•  provides a timetable;
•  makes clear both benefits and dangers; and
•  can be shown to be better than other options.

I  begin with the reasons why the President should adopt it:

• Other things being equal, reversing decisions and public statements is not an attractive option for a sitting president.  But other things are not equal.  I have asserted that the other three options endanger the country and could cost President Obama his job. 
• Even if he accepts this evaluation, the president must weigh any potential move in the scale of public opinion:  what do the people think?  Polls indicate a steady deterioration of support for the war. 

But, as any politician knows,  the public is fickle and substantial numbers of dedicated and influential people are still strongly in favor of “staying the  course” or even getting in deeper.   This, of course, is ,particularly true of the self-proclaimed military-political strategists (and above all the neoconservatives who are active in virtually all of the “think tanks” and write influential columns in most of the press not to speak of Fox News).  They speak to the sentiment of the far right of the Republican Party.
The President, who after all is a Democrat,  would be unlikely to be able to win over the Republican far right by any sort of compromise.  He must hope that the general public will reach the conclusion that “staying the course” is costly, does not work and is pointless.   But, if he waits until a course of action is completely evident to everyone,  it will be probably be too late to implement easily, cleanly and in command of our principal objectives.   Thus, a large part of a president’s responsibility is educating the public.  If we have a First Lady and even a First Dog, we need him to be our “First Teacher.”  He must, in short, work to create an environment in which reasonable policies will be understood and accepted.

• Consequently, the president must choose the timing of his action with great care and in doing so he would be wise to recognize and be prepared to deal with his Republican foes and Democratic rivals.   The best way he can do this is to do the job quickly and get it over with well before the next election.
• Timing will be influenced not only by the pace of domestic politics but also by  foreign opportunity.   Fortunately for him, the President now has been presented with an opportunity.  Although at terrible cost to Pakistan’s  society, its army has undertaken a campaign against the Taliban in  the Pashtun areas of Swat and both Waziristans.  Why is this an opportunity or rather how  could it be an opportunity?  At first sight the answer seems paradoxical:  it is that the campaign is unlikely to be completely successful:  the Taliban are unlikely to be so stupid as to stand and fight.  The proper tactic of the guerrilla is to hit and run.20   So, recognizing that they cannot win, the Pakistani military will soon offer a cease fire and the Taliban will accommodate. 

The Pakistanis have a long history with the Taliban, know them intimately, have subsidized them and have sought in the Taliban a barrier against Indian infiltration of their backyard, Afghanistan.  That long-term interest remains despite the current conflict.  And, at base, the Pakistanis share with the Afghanis, religion, a population of nearly 30 million Pashtuns and the desire to preserve their neighborhood from foreign control.  Thus, I believe that in the coming months, they will do what neither the Russians nor we have been able to do -- bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.  This move would offer a wise American president an opening to begin the process of turning over the war to our ally Pakistan.
To enable such a course of action to become effective and to encompass Afghanistan, we must set a date for ending our part of the war.  Before such a date is announced, negotiations are unlikely.  But it is important to be clear: It is the setting of the date rather than actually withdrawing that will enable the process to begin.
* * *
Once the date is set, let us say in late 2010 or early 2011, the villages and tribes, particularly in the southern part of Afghanistan but also soon in the center and north, will begin to jockey for position vis-à-vis one another and with whatever larger authority they think likely to affect their lives.  This will almost certainly take the form of their holding  village assemblies – known in the south as jirgas and in the north as shuras or among the Hazaras as ulus-- to sort out local issues.
Little known or appreciated outside of Afghanistan,  neither by the Russians in their time nor by us today, the jirga is the quintessential Afghan means of political action.  We need to understand it because, whether we like it or not,  it will play a major role in the way the war is brought to a close.  I must digress.
The jirga is a very old and common Asian way of settling disputes and legitimating ruling authorities.   Among the Mongols and Turks, it was known as a quriltai and similar assemblies were held by the Iranians.  Probably few Americans realize that a native American people, the Iroquois,  had a similar way of dealing with military and diplomatic affairs.
Is this just a historian’s indulgence in dredging up the obscure and the antique?
Fortunately, not. Jirgas are active at the village level all over Afghanistan today.  They are called into being either when village headmen, known as maliks, or respected religious figures cannot resolve a dispute or when a new event calls for change of course.  The jirga is thus a transient event, not a standing institution.  Its procedure is set by custom.  And it does not aim to mandate or to impose penalties; rather it is a process that aims to ventilate grievances, to debate alternatives, to dissipate angers and to affect accommodations until, at the end a consensus is reached.  Voting is not a part of the process.  But when a consensus is reached, it is considered absolutely binding and further opposition is regarded as treason.  To oppose the consensus could result in expulsion from the community which, in a tribal society, amounts often to a death sentence.
Since many of the problems of each village depend on actions beyond its locale, the village elders will press for and participate in tribal meetings.  In turn these participants will be drawn into regional meetings.   At the end of the process will be a grand national assembly which is known as a loya jirga.
Such meetings have been called on great issues of state for centuries.  Three were called in the 1920s to approve fundamental laws, establish the Afghan Muslim orthodoxy and legimate the change of rulers.  Another was called in 1949 to void existing treaties and establish the frontier with Pakistan.  In 1955,  a loya jirga composed of some 360 notables from all over Afghanistan assembled to declare support of an independent “Pashtunistan.”  Then in 1964, one was assembled to ratify the constitution.  Notably, the constitution proclaimed that the loya jirga is Afghanistan’s ultimate authority, being empowered ““to decide on issues related to independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity as well as supreme national interests”  and designated the loya jirga to be “the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan.”21
The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and  managed to by-pass or suppress it.  They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation.  The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga  and was not regarded by the people as legitimate.  The Russians left with their tail between their legs.   So what about us?
As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KGB expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, the Americans have “already repeated all of our mistakes...Now, there’re making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.”  He went on to say that when Americans come to question him on the Russian experience, “They listen, but they do not hear.”22    He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future.  An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years.   But we had already decided that Hamid Karzai was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis to interfere with our choice.  So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported,23“massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Karzai, installed instead.  [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely.  This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.”  While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan;  without one,  as  they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.”  Then,  as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times,24 our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” 
Among the lamentable results of this policy was that outside of the major cities, few Afghanis think of the government as legitimate.  Most regard it as a foreign tyranny.  Many have not heard of it or do not understand it. “They still look naturally to the tribal ‘shuras’ for security and justice.”25
Not understanding or being willing to deal with the concept of a loya jirga, we have sought to legitimate the men we chose to rule Afghanistan by an election.  Doing so has produced a great embarrassment to our government.  It isn’t only that the recent presidential election was blatantly fraudulent although that is what the press has focused on. Nor was the trumped up competition between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah important. As a Tajik, there was no way that Abdullah Abdullah could have been a credible candidate. He was just a straw man, put up to make it look like the election was a choice.  But even that was not the fundamental flaw:  the fundamental flaw was simply that elections – the American way of choosing and legitimating a government – is not the Afghan way.    The Afghan way is a loya jirga.
It is my belief that the holding of a loya jirga is the means that offers the best hope to create a reasonably peaceful, reasonably acceptable and reasonably decent Afghan government.
* * *
So the question is how to convene it.  The answer to that question is simple:  the Afghans have a traditional way to do so.  The central authority, in this case the Parliament, can call for a loya jirga.
Will they do it? 
Probably not so long as America is willing to pay them off and protect them.  So to get them to act, America must set a timetable for withdrawing.   Faced with that deadline and the need to protect themselves, the current members of the Parliament will have an interest in espousing what they will see as the national cause, and they will scramble to call for a loya jirga.
Participation is traditional.  It is made up by the upward thrust of recognized leaders from the village level to the provincial level to the national level.  We will have little or no influence on this process and it would not be wise for us to attempt to exercise any.  But, realistically, we must anticipate that a vast majority of the delegates, particularly in the Pashtun area, will be at least passive supporters of the Taliban.  I do not see any way that this can be avoided.  Indeed, even today while we are in occupation, qualified observers uniformly point out that, except when a large contingent of our soldiers is physically present, the insurgents are in control.26  At any given time, they control about 70% of the country.  That, as I have pointed out, was also the Russian experience. 
* * *
So what are the disadvantages and what are the benefits of the policy I recommend?   Let me highlight the potential criticisms:
The first criticism is that the Taliban will emerge from the war as the strongest organization in what at best is a coalition.  I do not see any way that this outcome can be avoided – indeed, whether it happens soon or not, it is virtually inevitable in the long run.  The idea that we can split the Taliban, engaging with the “moderates” while fighting the “hard liners” is an echo of what we tried in Vietnam.  It did not work there and shows no sign of working in Afghanistan.  Even after their bloody defeat in 2001, the Taliban suffered no serious defections.27  While our military leaders are still trying, it appears that “the Obama administration has concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a political or military movement, regardless of how many combat forces are sent into battle.”28
The longer we delay the process and the harder we try to prevent it, the more certain it is that the Taliban will dominate.  This has been uniformly true of insurgencies for the last two centuries all over the world:  those who fought hardest against the foreigners took control.29 
A really free loya jirga and one held soon is the best hope to create a more balanced national government.  This is partly because in the run-up to the national loya jirga, local groups will put forward and struggle to enhance or protect local interests.  That will constitute a natural brake on the Taliban which will find itself impelled to compromise.  And we should remember that despite all the hype about their early victories, much of the Taliban’s success was the result of negotiation.  Today, they enjoy the aura of national defenders against us; once we are no longer a target, that aura will fade. 
The second criticism:  suppose I am wrong.   Suppose the Taliban overawes all the village communities and emerges as the sole arbiter of Afghanistan.  What will be the danger to the United States? 
Recall that our invasion came about because the Taliban was providing a base – the meaning of the word al-qaida – for Usama bin Ladin and his acolytes.   Will they come back?  Will Afghanistan be a base for terrorism?  I don’t think so, or at least not in the same way.30
The terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 were partly trained in the United States and were based mainly in Europe.   Propaganda emanated from Afghanistan, but the real work was done elsewhere.31   Terrorists can operate anywhere.
As we, the Taliban and Bin Ladin have discovered, Afghanistan is not a suitable base.  It is land-locked, has poor communications, little money to give or lend outsiders and has learned how costly it is to give a free rein to terrorists.  True, Usama bin Ladin has been given sanctuary by the Pashtun people and/or by the Taliban.  For this, they have paid a heavy price.  They will not wish to continue to pay such a price.  And, more important, there are ways acceptable within the cultural code of the Pashtun people, the Pashtunwali’s imperative of melmastia (protection or refuge)that Bin Ladin and his band can be protected but disabled. A protected guest cannot be turned over to his enemies but he need not be allowed to endanger his hosts.    Pakistan, rather than we, should and can take the lead in bringing about this restraint.  Pakistan can, indeed, make it a condition for the ceasefire I have mentioned and the ultimate peace it will find to its interest to achieve.
The third criticism that can be directed at this program is that, focused as it must be on the Pashtun community which is Afghanistan’s largest group, it could split the country with the northern Tajik ,  Uzbek and Hazara areas withdrawing.  The fact is that those areas are already effectively separated from the Pashtun south. They are under the domination of independent warlords whom we were instrumental in installing and maintaining.32 So the calling of a national assembly will not break up the country; it already is split.  But if the jirga process begins, I think it is likely to end with a federation which the tribal structure of Afghanistan has always favored.  
Even if a sustainable arrangement  is not accomplished in the near term, the danger to American interests would be minimal.  Indeed, Afghanistan’s neighbors (Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran and perhaps India) would (or could be induced to) take a hand to push toward a modus vivendi as Henry Kissinger among others has pointed out.33
* * *
If we adopt this policy and allow the process to begin, how can we facilitate it? What will it cost?  What will it save?  How likely is it to enable us to leave Afghanistan as a viable society?  What will be the impact on the danger of terrorism?  And, what should we avoid while carrying it out?
The first step, as I have argued, is to set a date for withdrawal.  Once this is done, a notable transformation will begin in the psychology of the Afghans.   Today, even the non-lethal and beneficial efforts our government  and non-governmental organizations make are regarded with suspicion or are rejected.  General Petraeus perhaps unwittingly explained why:  In describing his counterinsurgency program, he proclaimed  that “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.”34 
The Afghanis of course realize this.  As Andrew Wilder and his team found in some 400 interviews, “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”35  And, since they regard all the civic action programs as the “weapons” in the war – as indeed they learned years ago from the Russians who similarly mounted large-scale “beneficial” or civic action programs in Afghanistan36  -- they have often destroyed schools, roads, bridges and even clinics. 
But, when the withdrawal pattern is set, the Afghans will have no reason to continue to do so.  At that point, aid programs, preferably administered at least in part by other countries or by international agencies will become acceptable and will help smooth the reconciliation process and encourage participation by the local loya jirgas, who after all are concerned with their neighborhoods’ prosperity and health. They will then eagerly seek what they now dramatically destroy.  Their needs are evident and urgent.  Afghanistan is a poor, land-locked, dry country with few resources.  Its people have suffered through virtually continuous war for 30 years.  Many are wounded or sick.  Their normal passage through schools into jobs and secure lives have been disrupted or derailed.  They hurt and are tired.   They need help.   It will be hard for them to employ outside help beneficially, but much can be done to pick up where a reforming government left off in the 1970s.  We can and should be a part of this process.
If we are wise, we will do so subtly rather than, as we often manage our aid efforts, with great fanfare.  Through the United Nations family of organizations, the World Bank or a coalition of Afghanistan’s neighbors, we can provide money for reconstruction projects.  Such ventures as the building of farm-to-market roads, the opening of clinics, a program of disease prevention,  subsidy for food-grain crops, electrification, purification of water, disposal of waste, etc. will be perceived by the village loya jirgas as unthreatening and beneficial once it is clear that they are not weapons in a counterinsurgency.
What will this cost?  If we participate, as we should in our own interest as well as for moral reasons, in these activities, we might consider offering (hopefully with matching funds from others), say, $5 billion dollars a year for the period the military and their hawkish civilian advisers propose, ten years.  That would amount to roughly $50 billion over a decade. 
So what will spending that amount of money save us? 
At our current level of activity – before the introduction of more troops – we are “burning” as venture capitalists say, about $60 billion a year.  Next year, our direct costs will probably rise to at least $100 billion.  And even that figure will surely rise in the years to come.  So the Congressionally allocated funds in the coming few years under even the most modest form of “staying the course” would amount to a minimum of $600 billion and more likely to much more.   On top of that, we are otherwise harming our economy so that over a 5 to 10 year period of our current policy the real costs we would incur would probably amount to between $3 to $6 trillion. 
This is money we don’t have37 and will have to borrow from overseas.  Those who have opposed expanding health care because of the costs should note that the venture in Afghanistan will be more expensive with no compensating benefit.
The degradation of our currency is one effect of such an outlay:  during the period of the Iraq war, the dollar vis-à-vis the Euro has fallen from 80¢ to $1.50.  And currency traders are betting on a further fall.  The fall so far means that sovereign funds (notably Japan and China) that have lent us money have lost heavily; a further fall calls into question our ability to borrow at all.  Some funds (led by Kuwait) are considering transferring from the dollar to a basket of currencies while others (including South Korea) have stopped buying Treasury notes.  If we attempt to make up our shortfall by printing money, inflation is inevitable and will saddle our grandchildren with our debts. 
In short, by getting out, our saving would be immense, indeed perhaps, truly vital.
I have argued that if we get out soon and provide help for the transition, the Afghans will find their way back to their traditional way of governing themselves.   This will not be exactly our way, of course, but they will recreate a viable society.  If we look at what has happened in Vietnam in recent years, we have reason to believe in political evolution.38  Once the horrors of war recede in memory, the joys of peace become powerful forces.  And, in any event, at some point, whether now or years from now, the Afghans will face this challenge; my judgment is that the sooner it happens the more likely and the quicker is achievement of an acceptable degree of success.
What about terrorism?  As I have pointed out, terrorists can operate anywhere; they do not need Afghanistan.  But they do need the support of people wherever they are.  So the more we are seen to be enemies of their religion, opponents of self-determination and supporters of oppressive governments, the greater the danger we face.  We cannot completely overcome these charges, but we can blunt or avoid the most blatant and the most unpopular. Three stand out:  first, we need to work hard to implement the call President Obama has made for us to recognize that we live in a multicultural world where we must respect the right of others to live their own way;  second, we need to repudiate the neoconservative-inspired U.S. National Defense Doctrine that asserted our “right” to preëmptively attack any country anywhere at our sole discretion; and, third, we must stop the dangerous and unproductive “James Bond” games of subversion which we have played for years.  Otherwise, there will be a continuing incentive for the weak and angry to find means to attack us.   This is not to say that we must let down our guard:  there are and will continue to be dangerous, deranged and determined malefactors in other countries – just as there are in ours – so we will need to employ a variety of police measures to protect ourselves.  But once we are no longer generally seen to be “the enemy,” such psychopaths will be far less dangerous because no longer popular.
Finally,  we should avoid moves to create an overwhelming military and police force in Afghanistan.  That is what we are being told is necessary. I think that would be a very dangerous and self-defeating move.  Every time we provide weapons, as independent observers constantly tell us, the newly empowered force uses them against the public to extort money or goods or to kidnap people or rape their wives and children.  It is highly unlikely that such forces can be disciplined by the existing, monumentally corrupt government39 (or by us) for years to come.  And even if they were disciplined, they contribute little or nothing to the Afghan economy or society.  And, of course, they ultimately pose the danger of a military dictatorship since balancing civil institutions are still and for years will remain weak.
What we should do is to put our emphasis on the creation of a quasi-military force like our Corps of Engineers which could, under proper supervision and with proper funding, make a real contribution to the country.  It would also help alleviate the chronic problem of unemployment.  The police force should be kept small, only lightly armed, and subject to some supervision by village and tribal jirgas.
* * *
What follows?
We are indeed at a cross-roads in our history.  The step the President takes on Afghanistan is a step on a road that could lead either to catastrophe or away from it toward  a new period of our prosperity, freedom and security. 
In one direction,  we will move in the direction signposted  by the Australian armchair warrior David Kilcullen, the key adviser and ghost writer for Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, and enthusiastically approved by the neoconservatives. They and Petraeus’s and McChrystal’s new acolytes among junior officers – saw Iraq and see Afghanistan as the first steps in America’s crusade, what they have named the “Long War.”
The Long war would truly be a march out into the wild blue yonder.  The neoconservatives and the new military leaders believe it will last generations.  Fifty years is said to be already under planning at the Pentagon.40 The cost, even in economic terms,  cannot be predicted – numbers lose meaning beyond 15 or 20 trillion dollars.   But the ultimate cost will be the end of America’s position as the world’s leading power.  Our standard of living will fall; our sources of borrowing will dry up; and we will stand in danger of the kind of economic implosion that destroyed what in the 1920s was arguably Europe’s leading democracy, the Weimar Republic. 
While the monetary and general economic costs are the most obvious, my real worry is about the fundamental beliefs and institutions of our country.  I confess that I am very emotional about this:  I have inherited through my family both a military and a civic tradition that I see being undermined in the name of patriotism. Patriotism is a blunt instrument and can be wielded by dictators – as Herman Göring observed during his trial at Nuremburg -- as often as by democrats.  I don’t want to lose the America in which I was born, have served and believe in.  So I determined to do what I can to protect and preserve our heritage of freedom, decency and mutual respect.  These are the key elements in the social contract we share with one another  and which we share with our government.  To lose that social contact is to descend into chaos.  Of course, “it can’t happen here,” but let us not forget the fate of the Weimar Republic: it was an economic implosion that did it in. 
To the contrary, getting out of Afghanistan, could lead us toward a reassertion of the principles and purposes that have made our country not just respected for its wealth and power but beloved throughout the world. If we make a sincere effort to live up to the message in President Obama’s address in Cairo – that we are willing to live in a multicultural world – much of the fear and danger we perceive today will become a bad memory.   Then we can truly turn toward the serious business of educating our children, providing our citizens with adequate health care and again becoming for the world’s peoples “a city on the hill.”

1  The Guardian, March 20, 2009, Julian Borger, “In real terms, Nato is losing.” 

2  Portside.Org, Sept 11 09 “Foreign Policy in Focus,” Conn Hallinan, “Afghanistan: What are these people thinking?” The field manual on counterinsurgency recommends a ratio of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents: for Afghanistan, population 33 million,  that would be at least 660,000 specially trained soldiers.   Also see The International Herald Tribune, September 5, 2009, Mark Moyar (professor of national security affairs as the US Marine Corps University) writes that Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence proposes a ratio of 25 troops for each 1,000 Afghans.  The New York Times, Oct 11, 2009, AP “Afghan Outlook Bleak as Taliban Grabs Territory:” “…a former top commander there, US. Gen Dan McNeill, said in an interview with NPR last summer that ‘well over 400,000 troops’ are needed to tame the country.  He then called it ‘an absurd figure,’ because Afghanistan will never see that many troops…More troops would mean more forces driving over increasingly lethal roadside bombs.”  The basic government text is The U.S. Army [&] Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.  Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007, it has forewords by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos and Lt. Colonel John Nagl.

3   Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009, Gilles Dorronsoro, “Focus and Exit: An Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War.”

4 UPI, September 2, 2009, Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Commentary: Strategic retreat.”  He points out that when President Kennedy was assassinated we have 16,300 formal advisers redesignated as fighting troops in Vietnam.  Five years later, there were 536,000.”

5    The New York Times, September 2, 2009, James Glanz, “Contractors Outnumber U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.”  According to the Congressional Research Service, they averaged 65% of all Pentagon forces in Afghanistan.

6  The Toronto Globe and Mail,  June 12, 2008, Anatol Lieven, “The Dream of Afghan democracy is dead.”  “In recent meetings involving Nato officials I have been struck by the combination of public acknowledgment that, to achieve real and stable progress in Afghanistan, western forces will probably have to remain there for a generation at least…”

7  Congressman John Murtha, the chairman of the subcommittee on military appropriations, has said that expenditures will pass $1 trillion next year.  The New York Times, November 15, 2009, Christopher Drew, “High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War.”

8 See my book, Violent Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 2008) where I discuss the study made by Nobel Prize Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Linda Bilmes.  They calculate that  the real cost to America, as it would be figured by standard accounting methods, is between one and two trillion dollars.    They have since revised their estimates upwards.  Indeed some other economists think the costs are more realistically set at about $6 or even 7 trillion or over half of the yearly Gross National Product of America.  As we check the individual costs of Afghanistan, it is unlikely to be a bargain.  For example, shipping fuel to Iraq cost about $40 a gallon whereas in Afghanistan just the shipping cost is reputed to $400 a  gallon.

9  The Washington Post, November 14, 2009, Ann Scott Tyson, “U.S. soldiers’ morale down in Afghanistan.”

10  I deal with these matters in my book Understanding Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

11    I am indebted to Dr. Hans Noll, American Cancer Society Professor of  Genetics and Molecular Biology, for the following information:  when depleted uranium shells strike their targets, the heat of the impact mutates the uranium into an aerosol of. U3O8 .  “It settles as a fine dust, which enters the body in a variety of ways.  Uranium oxide is an extremely potent neurotoxin with a high affinity for DNA.  This DNA fragmentation, which results in genetic defects like cancer and malformation in developing fetuses.  The dust particle, because of its high toxicity, is much more harmful than the low radioactivity associated with it.  Inhaled as dust, uranium oxide is accumulating in the lungs, liver and kidneys and affect the nervous system within weeks.

12 The New York Times, October 25, 2006.  Nicholas D. Kristof, “On Minute in Iraq = $380,000.

13   The Guardian, August 15, 2009, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad ‘, “Inside the Taliban: ‘the more troops they send, the more targets we have.”

14 International Herald Tribune, March 4, 2009, Celestine Bohlen, “’Graveyard of empires’ with a lesson for U.S.”

15 IPSnews, September 23, 2009, Gareth Porter, “U.S. Afghan Campaign Plan Says Key Groups Back Taliban.”  Mr. Porter points out that by leaking his report to the President, General McChrystal, had made an “obvious effort to force the hand of a reluctant President Barack Obama to agree to a significant increase in U.S. troops.”

16   TomDispatch.com, Ma 23, 2009, Tom Engelhardt, “”Gen. McChrystal, Grim Reaper: Obama’s New Afghan Commander Will Send Death Toll Soaring.”

17 International Herald Tribune, October 5, 2009,  Henry Kissinger, “Afghanistan’s cruel options.”

18 Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Long War,”  The London Review of Books,  March 26, 2009.

19  The New York Times, November 13, 2009, Mark Landler and Jeff Zeleny, “Ambassador’s U.S. Ambassador General Karl W. Eikenberry, a former military commander in Afghanistan, who opposes sending more troops.

20  The Taliban has developed quite sophisticated tactics which they have set out in a detailed training manual.  See The Daily Telegraph, August 18, 2007, Isambard Wilkinson and Ashraf Ali, “How to be a jihadi: Taliban’s training secrets.”

21 International Herald Tribune, September 16, 2009, Ansar Rahel & Jon Krakauer, “Save Afghanistan, look to its past.” [Rahel, a lawyer, advised King Muhammad Shah’s loya jirga committee.]

22 New York Times, October 20, 2008, John F. Burns, “An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons from the Past.”  He commented that “The more foreign troops you have roaming the country, the more the irritative allergy toward them is going to be provoked.”

23 Christian Science Monitor, August 20, 09, Thomas H. Johnson(research professor at the Naval Postgrad school in Monterey) and M. Chris Mason (a retired FSO who worked in Paktika province, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington), “Democracy in Afghanistan is wishful thinking.”

24 August 17, 2009.

25 The Financial Times,  February 12, 2008, Gideon Rachman, “Too Soon to Give Up in Afghanistan.”

26  The Guardian, August 18, 2009, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “Face to face with the Taliban.”  He points out that one of the Taliban government locations which he visited was only 500 meters, roughly 600 paces, from a fortified police station.

27  Gilles Dorronsoro, Op. cit. “In fact, there have been no splinter groups since its emergence, except locally with no strategic consequences.”

28 The Washington Post,  October 9, 2009, Scott Wilson, “Emerging Goal for Afghanistan: Weaken, Not vanquish, Taliban.”

29 I have analyzed a dozen insurgencies throughout the world over the last two centuries in my book, Violent Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).  All exhibit this characteristic.

30  The New York Times, October 11, 2009, Scott Shane: “A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing U.S.”
Mr. Shane quotes Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer now monitoring al-Qaida and the Taliban for the United Nations, who argues that Mullah Omar has learned the lesson of 2001. “If the Taliban regains power,’ he said, ‘they don’t want Al Qaeda hanging around.’”

31    Aljazeera.net. October 7, 2009.  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said that the 9/11 attack was neither planned in Afghanistan nor carried out by Afghanis.  “Those who carried it out were people born in the US and Europe and they were trained there.  They were not Afghanis and they never got training in Afghanistan.”

32 International Herald Tribune, August 27, 2009,  James Risen and Mark Landler, “Karzai’s No. 2 puts U.S. in predicament.”  “…the decision to turn a blind eye to the warlords and drug traffickers…was a fundamental strategic mistake of the Afghan war.  It sent a signal to the Afghan people that the most corrupt warlords had the backing of the United States…”

33 The Nation, Nov 17, 2008, Tariq Ali, “Operation Enduring Disaster” and International Herald Tribune, October 5, 2009,  Henry Kissinger, “Afghanistan’s cruel options.”

34 United States Army Combined Arms Center, Leavenworth, Kansas, Handbook 09-27 April 2009. “Center for Army Lessons Learned.”  Also see the Department of State,  Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policy Makers: A work in Progress, October 2007, Department of State Publication # 11456.

35 International Herald Tribune, Sept 17, 2009, Andrew Wilder [research director at Tufts University Center] “Squandering hearts and minds.”

36 Russian ambassador Zamir N. Kabulov pointed out that during their occupation the Russians spent billions on education, building roads, dams and other infrastructure as well as education and programs designed uplift women, “to no avail.”  See New York Times, October 20, 2008, John F. Burns, “An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons from the Past.”

37   The latest figures, reported in The New York Times, November 15, 2009, David Barboza, “China’s Sprint for the Gold,”  show a U.S. trade deficit of $422 billion with China holding an amazing $2.273 trillion in foreign currency, much of it obligations on the United States.”   The U.S. budget deficit for the fiscal year is estimated at $1.4 trillion according to Christopher Drew, op. cit.

38   The Guardian, December 14, 2008, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, op. cit.  Mr. Ahad, one of the few foreign reporter who went into insurgent-held territory and met with Taliban leadership.  One of the men told him that while he had not approved of the Taliban, the new organization, known as Threki Taliban, “was not the same” as the group that had ruled before.

39   The New York Times, January 2, 2009, Dexter Filkins, “Bribes Corrode Afghans’ Trust in Government.”  As Mr. Filkins wrote, “Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft…Everything seems for sale.”  The drug traffic reaches into the presidency.  See The International Herald Tribune, October 6, 2008, James Risen, “Reports link brother of Karzai to drug trade.”  On police corruption, The New York Times, April 9, 2009, Richard A. Oppel, Jr. “Corruption Undercuts Hopes for Afghan police.”  And on troops and police passing ammunition to the Taliban see The International Herald Tribune, May 20, 2009, C.J. Chiver, “In captured Taliban munitions, clues to leaks.’  Henry Kissinger, a supporter of the war, admits that ‘Reform…will require decades.”  International Herald Tribune, February 27, 2009, “The Way Forward.”

40 The Nation, October 14, 2009, Tom Hayden, “Kilcullen’s Long War.”  Mr. Hayden says that the plan was hatched in 2005.  Also see Bacevich, op. cit. and the British view, as outlined by General Sir David Richards, the newly appointed Chief of the British General Staff, is set out by Sam Marsden, “Afghan mission ‘could last 40 years’.” The Independent, August 8, 2009.