Yglesias: The Status Quo Remains the Policy in the Middle East

As the bills for the Middle East wars continue adding up in lives and treasure, and the US in poor economic health, they really have to figure out a new shift of direction. Obama had a great speech in Cairo, but it's the actions that are going to be important. If he keeps up what Bush started for his term as President, the words won't matter.

In a search to find alternative ideas, I stumbled across this Matthew Yglesias piece in the Daily Beast. He doesn't offer great solutions, but at least points out that the status quo isn't working. (Read the full article here.)

What we can do is change the way we relate to the existing governments. Currently, whether we're officially on record as favoring democracy or not, we're still deeply in bed with status quo regimes. Our global network of military bases includes installations in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iraq and our warships operate constantly in the region's coastal waters. After Cairo, Obama went to Germany where America also has military bases. But unlike the German bases, the Middle Eastern ones are deeply unpopular and seen as a legacy of colonialism. When the president of the United States stands besides a German chancellor, a French president, or a British or Canadian prime minister, it is seen as a meeting of equals; in the Middle East, it's more like a visit from the imperial center to the provinces.

And while we shouldn't be naïve enough to think that Osama bin Laden would just pack up and live a quiet life in the absence of the heavy American military presence in the region, it can't be denied that they're frequently cited as a rallying cry and recruiting tool. What's more, it's their presence that undergirds the broader logic of al Qaeda's view that Muslims must attack the "far enemy"—the United States—in order to express their grievances with local governments. The invasion of Iraq, needless to say, did a great deal to intensify Arab fear that the United States is seeking the imperial subjugation of their lands (and oil). And Obama's disavowal of the invasion helps in this regard, but there continues to be speculation about "residual forces" remaining in Iraq even after Obama's promised withdrawal of "combat forces."

More tellingly, the bulk of our bases in the region were first established in the wake of the first Gulf War in order to "contain" the threat from Saddam Hussein. Today, Saddam is gone. But the bases aren't. On the merits, there's no need for them. The balance of power in the Persian Gulf is of some interest to the United States, but forces kept "over the horizon" could move into place if for some reason they were needed. Meanwhile, as long as the bases exist, they continue to serve as visible reminders of the ties between the U.S. and Arab autocracies—reminders that speak more powerfully than any speech can.

This is a big dilemma for the Americans. They can't understand why, and refuse to believe that the Arabs don't like their presence. America is a great force of good in the world, but they have to face up to the fact that the people in that region don't see it that way.

They need to pull up the stakes and get out of there. There's nothing in the US Constitution that says America has to protect democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's messy, it's ugly: Let them work it out alone. Don't think of it as a loss but a gain for the good of the country.

Waste of Time Diplomacy in the Middle East

Obama is going off to Cairo on Thursday, for a highly anticipated speech to the Islamic world. He'll try to make a big impression on the Arabs to stop hating the US:

He has his job cut out for him:

Al-Zawahri urged Egyptians to reject Obama when he makes his speech, calling him "that criminal who came seeking, with deception, to obtain what he failed to achieve in the field after the mujahideen ruined the project of the crusader America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia."

He said Obama's decision to come to Cairo showed the U.S. had not given up its alliances with dictatorial and corrupt Mideast governments.

"It is a clear message that America does not stand with reform and change and other lying American propaganda, but it stands with the continuation of the existing tyrannical, rotten regimes," said al-Zawahri.

Meanwhile a United States Poll: Few Americans have favorable view of Muslim world

That view compares with 46 percent of the people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey who say they have an unfavorable opinion of Muslim countries. That's up 5 percentage points from 2002, when 41 percent indicated that they had an unfavorable view.

Meanwhile, three in 10 say they have a neutral opinion of Muslim countries.

The poll also suggests that most Americans suspect people in Muslim countries don't think highly of the United States. Nearly eight in 10 questioned say people in Muslim countries have a unfavorable opinion of the United States, with 14 percent saying Muslims hold a favorable view.

But the poll indicates Americans seem to be split on whether such negative opinions by Muslims matter. Fifty-three percent of those questioned say they think Muslim views of the United States matter greatly or moderately, with 47 percent saying that Muslim opinions of the United States don't matter very much or at all.

More and more I'm becoming a isolationist when it comes to the Middle East. Too much trouble, and the American public increasingly don't want to get involved.

Can you see Afghanistan and Iraq becoming full functioning democracies? Allies? Where western tourists visit on holidays? No way. So why are we there? If it's because of oil, we sure have wasted precious lives and lots of money on something we still buy at market price. Maybe if the damn stuff were cheaper....

Ralph Peters: Wrong Mission

I'm a big fan of Ralph Peters and once again, in this NY Post op-ed, he comes out swinging. He doesn't think Washington, and the Miliatry High Command understand the Afghanistan situation. AFGHAN GRAVEYARD

As this column has pointed out repeatedly, Afghanistan's worthless in and of itself. Securing hundreds of premedieval villages means local progress at the cost of strategic paralysis. To fight a mobile enemy, we need to be hypermobile. The dirt doesn't matter.

That's where special-ops come in. Our efforts should concentrate on supporting our black-program professionals. It's their fight. We need fewer troops, but a clear vision and more guts.

McChrystal needs to question all the "givens." And he needs to dismantle the NATO pleasure-palace that only impedes the war effort. Our commitment must be streamlined, not fattened and diffused. We need to focus on what must be done, casting aside what just seems nice to do.

Getting it right in Afghanistan -- and across the frontier in Pakistan -- means digging fewer wells and forcing our enemies to dig more graves. I'll bet on McChrystal to get it right. If he's allowed to.

Nation Building Ideal Almost Lost

Pulling out of Afghanistan is gaining support on the right. Here's Diana West in at the ultra-neo-conservative Townhall: Let Afghanistan Go

I decided to ask someone with real military experience how we could fend off jihad without further digging ourselves into Central Asia. I called up retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, one of the few top military leaders who talks on the record, to ask for his strategy recommendation for Afghanistan.

"Basically, let it go," he said.

Let Afghanistan go -- music to my ears, particularly given the source is no Hate-America-First professor or Moveon-dot-org-nik, but a lifelong patriotic conservative warrior. "There's nothing to win there," he explained, engaging in an all-too-exotic display of common sense. "What do you get for it? What's the return? Well, the return's all negative for the United States."

Obama is making a huge mistake by continuing this war. I thought he was supposed to bring "change"?

Fresh New Nation Building in Afghanistan

Canadian Forces have a new strategy. It's described with corporate buzz words and bureaucratese. Forces plan to defeat Taliban town by town

The innovative approach is to start in the town of Deh-EBagh in Dand District, where the Taliban recently launched a major attack. Afghan-led, the strategy is to involve targeted Canadian aid, technical assistance, and mentoring within a security bubble established by Afghan and Canadian forces.

Mentoring. That's one buzz word I can't stand. Corporations no longer do a review or assessment to see whether you deserve a bonus for the year, but they now "mentor" you. It's meant to put a positive spin on the situation but ends up coming across as condescending.

But seriously, we're in a war here. I don't think General Patton ever talked about "mentoring" the Germans.

"We want this to be absolutely tangible to the 800 or 1,000 people in that community," said Brigadier-General Jon Vance, who commands Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

"We develop the district in governance and R & D [reconstruction and development], and re-establish the social, political and economic fabric of a town in a district, and then another town, and another and another."

Listen to the general. He sounds like the Premier of PEI talking about repairing bridges.

The project, which will, over time, be expanded to include many more communities across Kandahar province, is designed to show Afghans what they can do in a secure environment, and to push out the insurgents who threaten the communities and use them as a base of operations.

This is sounding very long term. Have they forgotten that we are ending our commitment over there in 2011?

Does nation building work as a strategy? The situation has gotten worse, despite all the money and effort. It depresses me that we just keep trying harder. The article mentions that the Canadian initiative bears resemblance to the "Hearts and Minds" campaign by the Americans in Vietnam. And that one worked out well for them.

Irshad Manji No Longer Believes in the Afghan Mission

Reading this piece by Irshad Manji caught me by surprise. One of the great voices of women's rights in the Islamic world thinks it may be too difficult to reform Afghanistan:

There was a time when I believed. With every fibre of my feminist Muslim being, I believed in our Afghanistan mission. No longer.

On Sunday, the Taliban assassinated another Afghan women's rights activist. It happened only days after the world learned of yet one more anti-female statute that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had signed into law. Critics accused him of caving in to warlords ahead of the coming elections. Only when Western voices amplified the protests of liberal Afghans did Mr. Karzai put the law "under review." Human-rights advocates called it a triumph.

The victory, such as it is, will be short-lived. I'm increasingly convinced that Afghanistan's problem lies deeper than a recalcitrant Taliban or a gutless central government. It's a problem so profound that for the first time I have to ask: Should our troops just get out?

When somebody as optimistic as Manji thinks reform is impossible, then we have to conclude that she's right.

This leaves us only one reason to be in Afghanistan: To ensure that they don't build a base for world wide terrorism. This certainly is important but becomes moot when they have these bases right next door in Pakistan.

Why do we continue this mission over there when it's not working?

War for Defense Not Nation Building

George Jonas, in the National Post, thinks we lose focus of our objectives when we try to force western values on Afghanistan and Iraq. Why people should build their own nations

Third, we should remember we're not in Afghanistan to improve family law. We're there to eradicate the terrorist foe. We didn't go to Kabul and environs to decorate Eastern landscapes with Western motifs. We didn't go to replace autocracy with democracy, or an androcentric society with a gynocentric one. If we had, we'd be crusaders, just as Osama bin Laden keeps insisting we are. We went there to get the murderous SOB, not to prove him right.

I agree with Jonas on this controversial view. However, I really could have used this article in 2001 when we were ramping up to invade Afghanistan. Freeing women from Taliban oppression was a key issue to garner support. Even people who were weary of the invasion had to admit that helping the women of the country was a noble cause. It's disappointing, to say the least, that installing the new regime didn't do much good at all for them.

Withdrawal Strategy from Afghanistan?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has harsh words about the nation building project that we've embarked on for the last eight years:

THE HAGUE, March 30 -- The billions of dollars spent in U.S. aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years have been largely wasted, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," she said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."

Clinton called the amount of money spent without results "heartbreaking."

Is it just me or is this shockingly candid? Doesn't one conclude that we should not go any further with this project if the last eight years was futile? We're in a time where we don't have the billions to try to see if another eight years will work. (The article sites seven years, they are rounding down, I'm rounding up.)

This was not some kind of slip up by Clinton. If I had to guess, the Obama administration is managing expectations and perhaps preparing the way for a pull out. Feed the public that it's a lost cause, blame the previous administration for the failure and get out. It might take a year or two. We'll see. I hope so.

Nation Building Stupidity in Afghanistan

In a piece at New Majority, Michael Weiss has a case study on how difficult it is to get things done in Afghanistan. AN AFGHAN RECONSTRUCTION HORROR STORY, PART 1

By 2002, the U.N. resolution was lifted, but the state of industrial disrepair endured, and the hajj was being conducted in such a disorganized and dangerous manner that the new Karzai administration set itself an ambitious goal: By December 2005, all pious Afghans should be able to make an easy pilgrimage. This was the task Atash stood to inherit, so he was understandably reluctant to accept, citing also his lack of experience in the aviation industry. But Qasimi persisted and eventually his fellow expatriate felt morally obliged to accept the corporate presidency, which he describes as a “demotion” given his thirty-plus years as a successful businessman in Washington, D.C., and a slew of remunerative private sector offers. His government salary was set at $100 per month, paltry even by Third World standards, and the post required him to live in Kabul with U.S. and NATO forces on the ground and warlords and resurgent Taliban fighters still an ever-present threat to his safety. Atash also agreed, out of apparent magnanimity, to do without a personal security detail and to live in relatively spartan conditions at a time when most other administration officials and adjuncts enjoyed lavish accommodations.

But there was an additional reason for Atash’s reluctance: He knew the weak track record Karzai’s government had in weeding out corruption within its own ranks; corruption, Atash explains, was that government’s modus operandi, a fact that had become clear to anyone paying attention during even the early phases of reconstruction. “There is no culture of criticism of authority in Afghanistan,” Atash told me, “and anyone working in the government can afford to accept zero accountability for his actions.” The best tenure as a minister or high-level functionary was one distinguished by non-accomplishment, and a genuine reformer was seen as engaged in a hazardous occupation. “I killed my political ambitions by accepting this job,” Atash said. Nevertheless, his conscience prompted him to accept Qasimi’s offer, which he did in May 2005.

Corruption killed this airline project. It's impossible to get anything done.

To me, that is not the outrage. No doubt our western money contributed to this airline whose main goal is to transport Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. Crazy isn't it? So they can plonk down into Saudi Arabia and hear denunciations of infidels? Do you think the occupation of Afghanistan by the US and NATO is popular amongst the Islamic preachers? Do you think Death to America, or The Great Satan, ever comes up? Fighting the Taliban, radical extremists and yet, funding Afghans to attend the hajj? Smaaaaaart.

We need to get out of that hellhole and stop giving them money.

Radio Carny Barkers

I have posted on Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Civil War many times this week. Here is a very thoughtful piece by John Derbyshire in the The American Conservative on why these talk radio bloviators should be marginalized. (read)

With reasons for gratitude duly noted, are there some downsides to conservative talk radio? Taking the conservative project as a whole—limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad—has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

That last paragraph packs a punch. Those people chose sides and defended Bush through thick and thin, ignoring evidence in front of their faces. The majority of the population were seeing things differently. People often don't know what they want, but looking at Bush and guys like Limbaugh, the majority thought, I know what I don't want.

In my own little internet world, conservative websites had/have the same problem. Question nation building in Iraq or Afghanistan? You were a chickenshit, who wanted to "cut and run." Question neo-conservatism? You were a "paleo-conservative." (A term coined meaning dinosaur, old fogey and often used to describe Pat Buchannan.) Question George W. Bush? You had "Bush Derangement Syndrome." It became annoying and divisive.

That's why I started this blog. I couldn't find anywhere else where a conservative type could go to question the orthodoxies. Rightist blogs were fighting leftists so hard they couldn't admit that anything was wrong from their own camp.

Ralph Peters: Disneyworld on the Kabul River

Ex-US military intelligence officer Ralph Peters, comes out punching with his latest assessment of the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation. If you want nuance, read White House press releases. If you want the straight goods, go to to this (article)

After taking apart al Qaeda's base network and punishing the Taliban, we should have left the smoking ruins. This should have been a classic punitive expedition: We're not obliged to rehabilitate foreign murderers.

As for those who exclaim that "We would have had to go back!" - well, so what? Had we needed to hammer Afghanistan again in 2007 or 2008, that still would've been cheaper in blood (ours and the Afghans') and treasure than trying to build a "rule of law" state where no real state ever existed.

Staying left us with criminally vulnerable logistics - ever the bane of campaigns in the region. The Brits and the Soviets both learned the hard way that superior fighting skills don't suffice in Afghanistan: You need dependable, redundant supply lines.

(...)

They also want the new US administration to multiply foreign-aid bribes. (There isn't enough cash left in the country for Pakistan's elite to steal.)

Our response? We're paying up. Plus, dumber than dirt, we're turning to the Russians for an alternate supply line - after they bullied the Kyrgyz government into ending our access to a vital airbase north of the Afghan border.

But the central problem is the blind-alley mission. We kidded ourselves that we could conjure up a functioning rule-of-law state in the obstinately lawless territory known as Afghanistan, whose various ethnic groups hate each other unto death.

Instead of setting a realistic goal - mortally punishing our enemies - we decided to create a model democracy in a territory that hasn't reached the sophistication of medieval Europe.

Wow! Say what you want, but this is the free press in action. This is some of the best writing out there. I'm going to have to look into buying his book.

Tonight on CBC, President Obama was interviewed by Pete Mansbridge. On the Afghan mission, Obama talked about the need for using "diplomacy" and "development" as opposed to the merely, "military solutions." He should read Ralph Peters.