Community Defense Initiative

As the ads says, “There’s smart, and there’s K-Mart smart.” The President needs rabbits out of hats, the luck of the Irish and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound to solve his “get rid of the al Qaeda/Taliban” drive in central Asia. Our military offensive in Afghanistan is not working. The government we installed in Kabul is not only hopelessly corrupt, but it controls only the limited territory around that nation’s capital. We have not lived up to our pledge to the people of Afghanistan by building infrastructure and bringing peace and a quality of life to the Afghan people – choosing instead to deploy those recourses to a misguided war in Iraq. And Pakistan, which was willing to attack Taliban forces – for only a limited time – only when they attacked Pakistani troops and government officials, is a nation with too many hardline, anti-American constituents, from voters to the highest levels of their Inter-Services Intelligence (the dreaded ISI – their NSA, CIA and FBI).

As our military screams for more troops, the President must be thinking of the Afghan war that Russia fought, a losing effort ending in the late 1980s just before the Soviet regime collapsed, our failed Vietnam incursion that ended in the 1970s and how little we actually accomplished in Iraq, the land of perpetual suicide bombings, internecine warfare among and between political and religious factions and murderous disputes over oil-production. He has to think of the benchmarks he set out in September for Afghanistan to reduce corruption, create a functioning government with a credible legal system and train a domestic police from body of super-corrupt incompetents… none of which is remotely on track, punctuated with the recent “reelection” of President Hamid Karzai, amid clear and convincing proof of massive voter fraud and rigged polling stations.

Probably more for the American people, who are staggering under the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and watching over a trillion dollars (maybe two) of their tax dollars go towards what most are seeing as an unwinnable military effort in the region, Obama is once again setting out new benchmarks to the Karzai government to generate “measureable results,” knowing that without a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, the Karzai government would likely fall as the country sinks into total anarchy that the Taliban (with the foreign and disliked al Qaeda forces’ support) would clearly take advantage of.

Obama in an NBC interview during his recent trip in Asia: “The task here is making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable so that we can make that handoff… So my goal is exactly what you described — creating a situation in which our footprint is smaller and Afghan security forces can do the job of keeping their country together. They’re not there yet. They need help from us.” An understatement of alarming proportions.

There are those in our government who maintain that the only way for Karzai to patch together the support of the various war lords that really control local areas is for him to appear not to be the lackey of American policy… that Karzai must be seen as his own man with his own agenda. In short, Karzai’s most effective technique would be to use “managed cronyism” to effect a stable, albeit corrupt, peace across the land… to reward the corrupt allies who helped him rig the last election. Wow! America put this guy in charge.

But there is another alternative, likely to resonate with the Obama administration, that recognizes that Afghanistan is not truly a unitary functioning political entity, a “nation” with a sufficiently unifying political identity; Afghanistan is a nation of tribes and independent villages and towns. The November 21st New York Times: “The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say… The growth of the anti-Taliban militias runs the risk that they could turn on one another, or against the Afghan and American governments… The Americans say they will keep the groups small and will limit the scope of their activities to protecting villages and manning checkpoints… For now, they are not arming the groups because they already have guns.”

During the Soviet Afghan War (1979-1989), the American government supplied huge shipments of weapons and other assistance to the mujahedeen (the local “freedom fighters”) through Pakistan’s ISI to resist the Soviets. It must’ve worked, because the Soviets left in defeat. A good plan, no? Unfortunately, those local “freedom fighters” still had the weapons when the Soviet forces left; the Muslim fundamentalists used those weapons to subdue the local war lords and install a new government in Kabul: the Taliban! And these Taliban gave shelter and support to those al Qaeda forces that ultimately brought down the Twin Towers and blasted into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. We called the result “blow back.”

Even as the new policy favoring such local militias is beginning, there are signs that we are completely unable to control the results, that we will experience “blow back” in new and exciting forms. The Times again: “So far, there appears to be some divergence in the American and Afghan efforts. While American Special Forces units have focused on helping smaller militias, Afghan officials have been channeling assistance to larger armed groups, including those around the northern city of Kunduz. In that city, several armed groups, led by ethnic Uzbek commanders as well as Pashtuns, are confronting the Taliban… ‘In Kunduz, after they defeated the Taliban in their villages, they became the power and they took money and taxes from the people,’ Mr. [Hanif] Atmar, the interior minister, said. ‘This is not legal, and this is warlordism.’ [Kabul-based, U.S.] Colonel [Christopher] Kolenda said, ‘In the long run, that is destabilizing.’”

Roger that, Colonel. Mr. Obama, exactly what do you have planned that will stabilize this country, defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda forces (keeping them from fleeing into the safe harbors in the Western Tribal District in Pakistan so that they can fight another day) and stop the hemorrhaging flow of U.S. tax dollars to fight what appears to be an unwinnable war? Although the Pentagon uses a lower “per troop” average cost analysis, the Office of Management and Budget tells us that each additional soldier in Afghanistan adds about one million dollars to our annual costs in that war (the OMB looks at the cost of the equipment, weapons, support staff, housing, as well as the simple extra pay). And, Mr. President, if you cannot give that assurance (with real substance) to the American and Afghani people, exactly how fast can you extract our forces from that beleaguered zone?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.