The Pakistan Update

By Wajid Ali Syed

Bin Ladin is dead. Again. In the last ten years he has been reported “killed” at least four times. The only difference this time was that the President of the United States announced the death of the number one terrorist in the world. Above all, this time he was killed not in Tora Bora, not Karra Kurrum, but Abbottabad – close to an army garrison in Pakistan. As expected, his killing has raised questions, and more questions, and still more questions every time a new statement is added to the swirl of fact and myth that is turning the bin Laden raid into the stuff of legend.

Basically, a foreign national has been killed by another foreign army. (more…)

Tags: Abottabad, Al Qaeda, Army, CIA, Featured, ISI, Islamabad, Islamic groups, Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Taliban, US

Posted in Afghanistan, Around, Blog, India | 1,466 Comments »

by Bruce Reidel

Osama bin Laden’s death is a severe blow to al Qaeda–but not its end. His death answers some key questions about the terror cell and Pakistan, but leaves some even more perplexing ones still open.

First, congratulations to President Obama and the CIA. From the very start of his administration he ordered an intense focus on al Qaeda and its leader. The trail had long gone cold due largely to the diversion of critical resources to Iraq back in 2002 and 2003. Obama rightly promised to focus on Pakistan, the center of the global jihad and the most dangerous country in the world, and his efforts have now paid off.

Many had questioned whether bin Laden was still alive almost ten years after 9/11. But there was never really any doubt. By eluding justice after his first attacks on America in 1998, bin Laden created a mystique of invulnerability. He remained not just a symbol of al Qaeda’s continuing threat but a real leader, issuing strategic direction and propaganda.

His death weakens al Qaeda’s cohesion and its image of being beyond the reach of America. It comes after two years of intense pressure on the group and its allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan from American drones in the skies as well as NATO boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Key lieutenants like his operational commander in Afghanistan, a fellow Saudi named Abdul Ghani, have been tracked down and killed just this spring. The pressure was designed to weaken al Qaeda’s operational tempo, disrupting its routines. The strategy has worked. Presumably his hideout deep in Pakistan also contained clues and data that will help further dismantle al Qaeda’s core.

But the terror cell has always known bin Laden was at risk and it has devolved much authority to his deputy, the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, and to others. Zawahiri has been the public face of al Qaeda for years. Just this year he has released five audio messages focused on the Arab spring (he put out only four in all of last year). Bin Laden in contrast was silent about the wave of revolutions in Arabia. The New Mexico born Yemeni Anwar Awlaki has emerged as another operational and propaganda hub with his on line English language magazine Inspire and his al Qaeda Yemen cell has tried to attack Detroit and Chicago already. We can expect effusive memorials from them to their fallen “martyr.”

And we should expect the threat of more al Qaeda attacks to remain real. This weekend, several terrorists linked to al Qaeda were arrested for plotting an attack in Germany. Last week, the group’s Maghreb affiliate struck in Morocco, killing Western tourists.

Obama was right to call his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, to thank him for help in the chase. Zardari’s wife Benazir Bhutto was murdered by al Qaeda in 2007; the death of the country’s most popular and capable leader was perhaps the group’s biggest triumph since 9/11. Pakistan has yet to recover from her demise. Al Qaeda has been focused like a laser beam on Pakistan for the last decade. It rightly judges Pakistan to be both uniquely vulnerable in the Islamic world to jihadism and equipped with the ultimate strategic prize, the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world. With allies like the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, al Qaeda will remain a threat to Pakistan’s nascent democracy and to peace in the Indian subcontinent.

Obama should schedule an early Zardari visit to Washington and his own visit later this year to Pakistan to signal our support for democratic forces there. We also now know what many long suspected: that Bin Laden was not hiding in Pakistan’s tribal wastelands, but rather in its heartland. He was killed in Abbotabad, the home town of Pakistan’s first military dictator, Ayub Khan, just thirty miles from the capital Islamabad. This raises the question: who helped him all these years hide in-country? He was not alone in al Qaeda in hiding out in Pakistan’s towns and cities. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad and Abu Zubayda, two key al Qaeda operatives, were caught in Pakistan’s urban centers. Mullah Omar, bin Laden’s Afghan Taliban partner (and the man he swore loyalty to even in the last few years) has long been thought to be hiding in Pakistan’s mega- port of Karachi. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has often publicly said she suspected some in the Pakistani establishment knew where to find bin Laden. She raised the right question. It remains a good one.

Al Qaeda long ago became more than a terror group. It is an idea, the concept of global jihad against America. It has an elaborate narrative to justify murder. But Bin Laden was caught off guard by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions this winter and the wave of turmoil that has followed them. These popular uprisings challenged his whole worldview that terror and jihad were the only way to free Islam of its dictators and of what he called “Crusader-Zionist oppression.” The triumph of freedom in Tahrir Square was a blow to al Qaeda—a sign that aside from in Pakistan and Yemen, the group seemed increasingly marginalized. NATO is now fighting to free Libya, not to occupy it. Whether al Qaeda can adapt to the new Arab renaissance is an open question. Bin Laden won’t be able to answer it. Can his heirs?

Bruce Riedel, a former longtime CIA officer, is a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. At Obama’s request, he chaired the strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009.

Tags: 9/11, Abbotabad, Abdul Ghani, Abu Zubayda, Al Qaeda, Anwar Awlaki, Ayman Zawahiri, Ayub Khan, Benazir assassination, Benazir Bhutto, CIA, drones, Featured, Hillary Clinton, Islamabad, Jihad, karachi, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Lashkar e Taiba, Mullah Omar, NATO, Obama, Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari, Taliban

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog, News | 1,021 Comments »

By Nancy A. Youssef

The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.

What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.

The shift already has begun privately and came in part because U.S. officials realized that conditions in Afghanistan were unlikely to allow a speedy withdrawal.

“During our assessments, we looked at if we continue to move forward at this pace, how long before we can fully transition to the Afghans? And we found that we cannot fully transition to the Afghans by July 2011,” said one senior administration official. “So we felt we couldn’t focus on July 2011 but the period it will take to make the full transition.”

Another official said the administration also realized in contacts with Pakistani officials that the Pakistanis had concluded wrongly that July 2011 would mark the beginning of the end of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

That perception, one Pentagon adviser said, has convinced Pakistan’s military — which is key to preventing Taliban sympathizers from infiltrating Afghanistan — to continue to press for a political settlement instead of military action.

“This administration now understands that it cannot shift Pakistani approaches to safeguarding its interests in Afghanistan with this date being perceived as a walk-away date,” the adviser said.

Last week’s midterm elections also have eased pressure on the Obama administration to begin an early withdrawal. Earlier this year, some Democrats in Congress pressed to cut off funding for Afghanistan operations. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives beginning in January, however, there’ll be less push for a drawdown. The incoming House Armed Services chairman, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., told Reuters last week that he opposed setting the date.

The White House vehemently denies that there is any change in policy. “The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011. There is absolutely no change to that policy,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

On Tuesday, a White House official who spoke with reporters in a conference call arranged to discuss the December review, said the administration might withdraw some troops next July and may hand some communities over to Afghan authorities. But he said a withdrawal from Afghanistan could take “years,” depending on the capability of the Afghan national security forces.

He also said the December review would measure progress in eight areas, though he declined to specify what those are. Congress will get a report by early next year, but Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, will not testify.

“This is designed to be an inside the administration perspective,” he said, adding it will “set the policymaking calendar” for the Obama administration’s first six months of next year.

De-emphasizing deadlines also allows the administration greater flexibility in responding to conditions in Afghanistan, officials said.

While the Taliban are facing increasing coalition airstrikes, they have no driving incentive to negotiate with an unpopular government. Officials here quietly worry that while they, too, are seeing some drops in violence and the Taliban’s hold in pockets of Afghanistan, those limited improvements aren’t leading to better governance.

A U.N. report issued in August showed that civilian casualties rose 31 percent during the first half of the year compared with the previous year, 76 percent were caused by the Taliban, it said. So far, more than 400 U.S. troops have been killed this year.

Many officials here privately worry that talk of a withdrawal without results will cost the military credibility, with Americans and Afghans alike.

“What we ultimately need in Afghanistan is good governance,” said one senior military officer. “Right now there is a gap” between security gains and governance.

Christopher Preble, the director for foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, said he’s not surprised that the scope of the December review has narrowed and that Obama administration officials are no longer highlighting the July 2011 date.

“The very players who were arguing so strenuously for a deepening of our involvement in Afghanistan a year ago are unlikely to now declare that their earlier recommendations were faulty,” he said.

Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay contributed to this article, which originally appeared in the McClatchy Newspapers

Tags: Afghanistan, afghanistan withdrawal, deadline, general Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, house armed services committee, NATO, Obama, Pakistan, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, Taliban, u.s. central command

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog, News | 719 Comments »

If Barack Obama hadn’t realized that the hope and change magic spell was wearing off, he was jolted back to reality by an unknown audience member at a recent CNBC townhall meeting.

The IED came in the form of Velma Hart. Who? Exactly. Velma Hart has become the face of a group that has been growing steadily in number over the past several months: The Disgruntled Obama Voter. In less than one minute, Velma Hart became Hans Brinker in reverse; unlike the Little Dutch Boy, she pulled her finger out of the dyke and let the deluge take its course:

Quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the man for change I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I’ve been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people and I’m waiting, sir, I’m waiting. I don’t feel it yet. While I thought it wouldn’t be a great measure, I would feel it in some small measure. I have two children in private school, and the financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family. My husband and I joked that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives. And quite frankly, it’s starting to knock on our door and ring through that that might be where we’re headed. And quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer honestly, is this my new reality?

Sorry Mrs. Hart, this is reality, not new, not just yours, but the whole country’s. The campaign ended long ago. Democrats took control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. So what’s the problem?

Consider that Democrats are in the majority. Then take a look at the party’s recent record of failure. Failure to pass a repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Failure to pass the Dream Act. Failure to address immigration reform. Failure to schedule a vote before the elections that would force the Republicans to defend and support continuing tax cuts for the rich. Failure to protect the public by plugging the enormous loopholes in the flawed health care reform bill (a piece of legislation that Democrats are touting as a “victory”). Failure to close Guantanamo. Failure to roll back the more egregious civil rights abuses of the Bush-Cheney era (indeed, we’re looking at an expansion of government snooping, not the other way around).

The country is unemployed, uninsured, showing up for Glenn Beck rallies and voting for Tea Party-backed certifiable lunatics, thieves and liars in the Republican primaries. It would stand to reason that faced with the frightening reality of having Senator Sharron Angle or Senator Christine O’Donnell would energize Democrats and send them in a rush to the polls in November. But the Democratic base, having been burned one too many times by a party terrified of failing to appear “bipartisan” and continually kowtowing to the most extreme instransigence of the opposition, isn’t terribly motivated to vote. Some have even had the temerity to question whether Obama intends to keep even a single promise he made during the campaign.

It appears that the White House has finally gotten the memo. Their solution? Like angry parents, the President and his VP have taken the unprecedented step of treating what’s left of their base like naughty children. “Stop whining” scolds Joe Biden. “People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up…if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place” says Barack Obama. What’s next? “Don’t make me come down there”? Confiscating the Playstation?

But not to worry – the Democratic party chairman isn’t asleep at the wheel. This month the DNC announced a bold, game changing strategy: Call a meeting, splurge on a graphic artist and unveil an exciting new logo.

Tags: biden, christine o'donnell, democrats, election, Obama, Republicans, sharron angle

Posted in Blog, News, The Ballot Box | 1,151 Comments »

by Bruce Reidel

When Obama visits India in November, he must secure a deal on Kashmir, the disputed province where unrest is building again. At stake is another Indo-Pakistani confrontation—with nuclear potential.

Just as the war in Afghanistan is getting bloodier and Pakistan is drowning in floods, a new (yet old) battlefield is heating up in Kashmir. President Barack Obama’s strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan always needed a Kashmir component to succeed; that need is becoming more urgent and obvious now. His trip to India in November will be a key to addressing it.

An independent Kashmir is not in the offing. Neither India nor Pakistan would ever accept that outcome. Pakistan has been trying to annex Kashmir since the hour it was born in 1947 and has long and established ties to many terrorist groups operating in the province like Lashkar e Tayyiba, the group that attacked Mumbai in 2008. India is determined to hold on to the part of Kashmir it won in the 1947-48 war at all costs.

This summer, after several years of relative quiet, the Muslim majority in the Vale of Kashmir, the heart of the province, began protesting against Indian occupation. Young Kashmiris began protesting against what they allege are Indian occupation forces’ human-rights abuses. Up to 700,000 Indian army and police garrison the province with a very heavy hand. Stone-throwing produced clashes with the Indian army. Over a hundred have died in what is becoming a Kashmiri version of the first Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s. Polling shows the majority of the Muslim population wants independence.

There is a solution, however, to the problem. The cease-fire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the line of control, would become the agreed international border between the two countries. At the same time, it would become a permeable border for Kashmiris, who could move back and forth easily. Both countries’ currencies would be valid on both sides of the line. The two parts of Kashmir, Pakistani Azad Kashmir and Indian Kashmir and Jammu, would handle local issues like tourism, sports, and the environment in joint shared institutions along the lines of how Ireland and Ulster work together now on all Northern Ireland issues.

The broad outlines of this deal were worked out by then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in secret back-channel talks four years ago. Musharraf told me that while a deal was not consummated, they were very close when his domestic political problems shut down the exercise. Lashkar e Tayyiba’s Mumbai attack was designed to kill it for good.

The new uprising in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar makes it imperative to get back to the back channel and finish the talks. Pakistani President Asif Zardari probably would embrace them eagerly, but he is too weak to go alone. He needs the Pakistani army on board, and it is unclear if the army chief, General Kayani, Musharraf’s intelligence chief during the old talks, is on board. It will take strong and brave leadership to get a deal, but it is critical to defeating the jihadist Frankenstein that now terrorizes Pakistan itself. If left to itself, the Pakistani army will be tempted to intervene in Kashmir again to help the until now largely indigenous revolt, running the risk of another Indo-Pakistani confrontation.

Singh undoubtedly wishes he had seized the pending deal with Musharraf when it was there. India cannot become a global power with a prosperous economy if its neighbor is a constant source of terror armed with the bomb. A sick Pakistan is not a good neighbor.

For the U.S., reducing and resolving the India-Pakistan Cold War before it goes hot is critical to stability in South Asia, isolating the jihadi extremists and preventing a war in South Asia that could go nuclear. But India is understandably averse to American meddling in its internal affairs. President Obama learned that in the transition, when he briefly floated the idea of an American special envoy for Kashmir and he got a firestorm of Indian resistance.

Obama’s challenge is to quietly help Islamabad and New Delhi work behind the scenes to get back to the deal Musharraf and Singh negotiated. He will have a chance to work this subtly when he visits India in November. The new Kashmiri intifada has put the issue back on the front burner. A deal is good for America, India, Pakistan, and especially the Kashmiris, who have suffered enough.

This article originally appeared in www.thedailybeast.com

Tags: Asif Zardari, Azad Kashmir, General Kayani, India, Kashmir, Kashmir and Jammu, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Manmohan Singh, Obama, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

Posted in Around, Blog, India, News | 1,748 Comments »

by Steve Luxenberg

Obama campaigned on a promise to extract U.S. forces from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he described as the greater threat to American security. At then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell’s top-secret briefing for Obama, the intelligence chief told the president-elect that Pakistan is a dishonest partner, unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban, Woodward writes.

By the end of the 2009 strategy review, Washington Post editor Bob Woodward reports, Obama concluded that no mission in Afghanistan could be successful without attacking the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens operating with impunity in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions.

“We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan,” Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009. Creating a more secure Afghanistan is imperative, the president said, “so the cancer doesn’t spread” there.

The war in Iraq draws no attention in the book, except as a reference point for considering and developing a new Afghanistan strategy. The book’s title, “Obama’s Wars,” appears to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflicts among the president’s national security team.

This excerpt originally appeared in The Washington Post

Tags: Afghanistan, bob woodward, mike mcconnell, Obama, Pakistan

Posted in Around, Blog, News | 652 Comments »

by Steve Steve Luxenberg

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page “terms sheet” that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in “Obama’s Wars,” to be released on Monday.

According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. “Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”

Obama rejected the military’s request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. “I’m not doing 10 years,” he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. “I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.”

Woodward’s book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

But most of the book centers on the strategy review, and the dissension, distrust and infighting that consumed Obama’s national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction, goals, timetable, troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.

Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.

Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama’s political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.” Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president’s senior adviser David Axelrod to be “a complete spin doctor.”

During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was “[expletive] with the wrong guy.” Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.

Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, “How could you trust Hillary?”

“Obama’s Wars” marks the 16th book by Woodward, 67, a Washington Post associate editor. Woodward’s reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book “All the President’s Men.”

Among the book’s other disclosures:

– Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn’t think about the Afghan war in the “classic” terms of the United States winning or losing. “I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?” he said.

– The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

– Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA’s worldwide covert operations.

– A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. “They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally,” then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

– A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here “a potential game changer.” He said: “When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one where you can’t afford any mistakes.”

– Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. “He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,” Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

Obama kept asking for “an exit plan” to go along with any further troop commitment, and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session, the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the military’s open-ended approach.

In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise between the military command’s request for 40,000 and Biden’s relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20,000 as part of a “hybrid option” that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room, one by one, asking each participant whether he or she had any objections – to “say so now,” Woodward reports.

The document – a copy of which is reprinted in the book – took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy’s objectives, what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail, according to Woodward, to make sure that the military wouldn’t attempt to expand the mission.

After Obama informed the military of his decision, Woodward writes, the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision, peppering the White House with new questions. Obama, in exasperation, reacted by asking, “Why do we keep having these meetings?”

Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, they kept pushing for their 40,000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.

The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: “In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, ‘We’re doing fine, Mr. President, but we’d be better if we just do more.’ We’re not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we’re talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.”

Petraeus took Obama’s decision as a personal repudiation, Woodward writes. Petraeus continued to believe that a “protect-the-Afghan-people” counterinsurgency was the best plan. When the president tapped Petraeus this year to replace McChrystal as the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus found himself in charge of making Obama’s more limited strategy a success.

Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying, “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

This story originally appeared in The Washington Post

Tags: Afghanistan, bob woodward, david axelrod, Hamid Karzai, Hillary Clinton, james jones, Mike Mullen, NATO, Obama, petrea, Robert Gates, thomas donilon

Posted in Around, Blog, News | 1,742 Comments »

by Justin Elliott

Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward’s new book is coming out on Monday and both the New York Times and the Washington Post have written preview pieces.

So what will we likely be hearing about for the next month? Gen. David Petraeus once referred to top Obama advisor David Axelrod as “a complete spin doctor,” according to the book, titled “Obama’s Wars.” Joe Biden once called Afghanistan guru Richard Holbrooke “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” And national security advisor James Jones once called Obama’s political aides “water bugs.”

But what should we be talking about from the book?

The undeclared, undebated secret war in Pakistan is bigger than we knew, and it’s being conducted in part by CIA-trained Afghans:

The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

The Obama administration seems to be enamored with a drone-based foreign policy:

Mr. Woodward reveals the code name for the C.I.A.’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, Sylvan Magnolia, and writes that the White House was so enamored of the program that Mr. Emanuel would regularly call the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”

This is how President Obama defines victory in Afghanistan:

Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn’t think about the Afghan war in the “classic” terms of the United States winning or losing. “I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?” he said.

And this is the man who the United States is relying on over there:

The book also reports that the United States has intelligence showing that manic-depression has been diagnosed in President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and that he was on medication, but adds no details.

Woodward’s book presents an opportunity to explore and debate issues that haven’t gotten much airing — the war in Pakistan, the drone strikes, Obama’s continuation of various Bush-era policies. Unfortunately, it comes wrapped up with another opportunity: to obsess over sketchily sourced stories of interpersonal sniping within the administration.

This story originally appeared in Salon.com

Tags: Afghanistan, bob woodward, CIA, drones, general Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, james jones, Joe Biden, leon panetta, Obama, Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, sylvan magnolia

Posted in Afghanistan, Around, Blog, News | 1,770 Comments »

The brouhaha surrounding an explosive Rolling Stone profile, leading to the firing and retirement of General Stanley McChrystal, has had a fascinating unintended consequence. All of a sudden truth – or a form of it – has erupted in certain quarters. What a show.

The rare outbreak of candor started when freelance reporter Michael Hastings was granted unfettered access to commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal. What started as a normal interview turned into a month-long juggernaut of travel and drunken hijinks thanks to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The resulting profile yielded a veritable bevy of macho and shockingly candid quotes by McChrystal and his frat boy aides, who call themselves “Team America.” The General and his boys spare no one from their contempt, from Vice President Biden (“bite me”) to Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke to Ambassador Karl Eikenberry to National Security Advisor Jim Jones (“a clown”) and, of course, President Barack Obama. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen was spared. In other words, the gang Hastings was covering demonstrated their open contempt for their civilian counterparts and brought into stark relief the deep fissures in the U.S.’s team tasked to “win” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. All in all, the Rolling Stone article was a remarkable and revelatory piece of reporting.

The article had Washington scratching its collective head. What was McChrystal thinking? How could he have let his “boys” engage is such juvenile behavior in the company of a reporter? The hapless press aide who arranged the interview was the first casualty of the public relations disaster. Eventually McChrystal’s head would roll as well.

When the backlash eventually ensued it was not McChrystal’s judgment that was questioned. Hastings became the designated whipping boy.

And what a backlash it’s been. The Washington press corps has taken particular umbrage that a freelance reporter from an unserious, hippie magazine would have the gall to print such an article so embarrassing to its subject. One former Pentagon correspondent chimed in:

The dirty little secret among beat reporters who routinely travel with top military officials is that there’s a unwritten code, a general understanding, that off-color jokes, irreverent banter, and casual conversations are generally off-the-record, or on the deepest of background, unless otherwise agreed upon.

There was navel gazing about the “complex” relationship between source and journalist. There was an utterly bizarre column in the New York Times opining that Hastings broke the rules of etiquette by violating McChrystal’s privacy. Reporters were shocked that Hastings would commit the unimaginable gaffe of burning his bridges in such a spectacular matter (Hastings has made it clear that he has no bridges to burn).

But the most spectacular statement came from CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, the same Lara Logan who “reported” a shameless profile of Blackwater (now Xe) founder Erik Prince, an interview with questions so soft and revealing so little substance that it could have been produced by Blackwater’s PR department. Logan’s statements on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” were the clearest demonstration of the unhealthy dynamic between the mainstream press and the powerful subjects they cover. Her shockingly McCarthy-like observation that “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has” should ring a warning bell at CBS and serve as an indication that perhaps Logan would be better off running the Pentagon’s Public Affairs office instead of posing as a reporter.

What seems to have been forgotten is that Rolling Stone gave McChrystal the opportunity to refute the article and the quotes before going to press. The General gave the publication the thumbs up. By his own admission he voted for Barack Obama. Evidently he banned Fox News from his headquarters. The General is no babe in the woods when it comes to the media. He shrewdly manipulated the press on a number of notorious occasions, including the Pat Tillman scandal and detainee abuse. He also used the media to strong arm Obama into writing the General a blank check for his operation in Afghanistan.

The only member of this mob who retained his dignity was Hastings himself:

Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on f*****g K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.

So McChrystal is off to write his memoirs and serve on corporate boards, the press have covered themselves in shame and, if there’s any justice in the world, Michael Hastings will be nominated for the Pulitzer. But there’s a silver lining to this clown show.

The U.S. Constitution gives the President, a civilian, the power of Commander in Chief. In that capacity he has the authority to fire military commanders at will. Never in the history of the Republic has an aggrieved military man attempted to overthrow the civilian who has the final word. Generals who felt the tug to aspire to that office have run for it. Some have won, some have lost.

It’s gratifying to know that when it comes to transfer of power, the cynical American public can rest assured that it won’t come at the barrel of a gun.

Tags: Afghanistan, Featured, Jim Jones, Joe Biden, karl eikenberry, mcchrystal, michael hastings, Military, NATO, Obama, Pak US relations, Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, rolling stone, US Army

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Pakistan and India’s prime minsters had a short face-to-face Monday during the nuclear security summit in Washington, amid attempts by Islamabad to convince New Delhi to set aside its anger over the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai and resume peace talks.
Pakistan’s Yousuf Raza Gilani shook hands with India’s Manmohan Singh during the nuclear summit dinner reception but the two men did not discuss anything of substance.

The foreign ministers of the two nuclear-armed rivals met in February to explore the possibility of reopening a peace process that was halted by India following the Mumbai attacks that killed more than 160 people. New Delhi has accused Islamabad of not doing enough to target the extremists that carried out the attack, Lashkar-e-Taiba. (more…)

Tags: India, Islamabad, Lashkar e Taiba, LeT, Manmohan Singh, Mumbai Attacks, Nuclear security, Nuclear Summit, Obama, Pakistan, terrorists, Yousuf Gilani

Posted in Around, India, News | 833 Comments »