Af/Pak Instahoglets Sunday

By Steve Hynd

Some linky goodness for your Sunday evening:

-- Derrick Crowe has been blogging up a storm since becoming the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Check out his latest, over at OpenLeft: "War Gone Wild in Afghanistan". The big-money question is "How is it possible that when the populations of both countries and the Commander-in-Chief's political base agree on a policy direction we find ourselves moving in the opposite direction?" Would Obama and his commanders really have us believe that to protect democracy in America and to build it in Afghanistan, we must trample it?

-- The London Times looks at the massive vote fraud which has brought Mohammed Karzai within a carefully US-managed hairsbreadth of a first round victory in the Afghan election and asks "If substantial numbers of Afghans decide that the vote was rigged, what do other governments do then?" More to the point, perhaps - if substantial numbers of Afghans take up arms against their own illigitimate government, as they've been promising to do, what will the occupying ISAF forces do then? Will they try to tell these disaffected insurgents apart from Taliban fighters or just bomb the lot and let Allah sort them out?

-- Talking of which...Joshua Foust and Derrick Crowe both take on the recent debacle in Kunduz province that caused so many civilian casualties. It's painfully obvious that NATO forces in theater can talk about avoiding civilian casualties until they are blue in the face but when it comes down to it "force protection" always wins out. That's a major reason I've argued that the U.S. and its allies cannot do COIN except on paper.

-- But it looks like McChrystal, rather than admit that or admit he can't make his subordinate commanders from allied nations obey orders, is leaking like a sieve in advance of blaming the Germans for this one. (Sorry, that last link is to an AP report.) Expect that to blow up in ISAF's faces as either the German left will use the carnage to pressure for withdrawal or the German right will get its collective nose out of joint at McChrystal's CYA and begin to wonder why they continue to support the Af/Pak quagmire.

Update: Thomas Rid at Kings Of War blog agrees that McChrystal may have made a serious political misstep, landing his German allies in the shiesse just in time for the elections in 3 weeks. I've a suspicion his own resume is more important to Stan The Man than such larger considerations (just like his patron, Saint Petraeus). I repeat, the constant failure to observe R.O.E. restrictions on airstrikes either means that the ISAF allies are institutionally incapable of such fine-tuned restraint or McChrystal can't control his subordinates. Blaming the Germans for this single case doesn't help that and neither looks good on McChrystal's record.

-- I've already written about why I think Britain is getting ready to head for the Af/Pak exit whether Obama wants it to or not...and Robert Naiman is encouraging that British exit. Dear Britain: "Get Out of Afghanistan, So We Can Get Out"

-- Finally, kudos to Zaid Jilani, blogger/reporter at Think Progress, who has bucked the trend at the Center for American Progress - "one of the main intellectual forces behind our current strategy in Afghanistan" - to join the blogging team at Rethink Afghanistan. Zaid writes:

I have deep disagreements with my colleagues like Lawrence Korb, and I want to use this space to voice many of those disagreements. It�s time we, as Sanders recommends, have a real national debate about the war in Afghanistan and our greater national priorities. It�s in the spirit of a liberal democracy that I encourage you to reach out to your friends, co-workers, neighbors, and whoever else will listen, and ask them to rethink their views on what�s happening in Afghanistan. Encourage a lively debate � that�s the only way we�ll turn our disastrous course around.

That debate has been months late in starting outwith the DFH blogs, but seems to have suddenly picked up momentum. Good.