I See Friedman's "Yikes" and Raise

By Steve Hynd

Tom Friedman, when he shucks his schtick that every brown person is just a child who needs American leadership, can actually state the bleeding obvious pretty well.

The president�s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said flatly: �This can�t be nation-building.� And the president told a columnists� lunch on Tuesday that he wants to avoid �mission creep� that takes on �nation-building in Afghanistan.�

I am sorry: This is only nation-building. You can�t train an Afghan Army and police force to replace our troops if you have no basic state they feel is worth fighting for. But that will require a transformation by Karzai, starting with the dismissal of his most corrupt aides and installing officials Afghans can trust.

This surge also depends, the president indicated, on Pakistan ending its obsession with India. That obsession has led Pakistan to support the Taliban to control Afghanistan as part of its �strategic depth� vis-�is India. Pakistan fights the Taliban who attack it, but nurtures the Taliban who want to control Afghanistan. So we now need this fragile Pakistan to stop looking for strategic depth against India in Afghanistan and to start building strategic depth at home, by reviving its economy and school system and preventing jihadists from taking over there.

That is why Mr. Obama is going to have to make sure, every day, that Karzai doesn�t weasel out of reform or Pakistan wiggle out of shutting down Taliban sanctuaries or the allies wimp out on helping us. To put it succinctly: This only has a chance to work if Karzai becomes a new man, if Pakistan becomes a new country and if we actually succeed at something the president says we won�t be doing at all: nation-building in Afghanistan. Yikes!

That's good stuff, as far as it goes - but it misses a lot of wood for the trees. Partly because, and there's a shadow of his favorite meme here, Freidman is ignoring a lot of the wider picture.

Karzai is in a cleft stick here, for one thing. He has got to know that excluding some of his murderous cronies from what they see as their rightfully-earned ill-gotten gains as his supporters will mean his bodyguards will need to be the best in the world. And he's setting out a trap for the U.S., ready to hang Obama on America's own rhetoric instead of getting hung from a lampost himself.

To prepare his country, Karzai said, he would do all he can to root out corruption and improve governance. He has fired corrupt officials already, he said, adding he is prepared to act against anyone proven to be breaking the law.

However, he warned against other nations using the corruption as a political tool in making decisions about Afghanistan. And he said the United States and its allies also must halt practices that contribute to corruption from outside the country or create what he called "parallel" governance issues.

..."Afghanistan is a sovereign country, it has a sovereign government, it's not an occupied country," Karzai said, adding that a foreign power can't undermine or go around the government to deal with whomever it chooses.

In other words, "don't go sneaking around behind my back when I don't keep my promises, or you'll find Afghanistan even more hostile than you do already. I need you only a little more than you need me". And Karzai is right to point the blame at the U.S. for helping create and perpetuate Afghanistan's corruption problem. Only about a dime in each dollar of reconstruction money gets spent on actual reconstruction - the rest drops into various pockets, including American ones, as bribes, protection money, profiteering and graft. If Karzai did everything he promises and the US did nothing on its own end of the contractor-warlord-aid spectrum, Afghanistan would still be too rotten with corruption to become a viable state.

Karzai's hedging his bets on the idea that Afghan security forces will be ready on time too - perhaps because he knows his own best protection are those foreign forces that he says don't occupy his country.

"We will try our best as the Afghan people to do it the soonest possible," Karzai said. "But the international community must have also the patience with us and the realization of the realities in Afghanistan. If it takes longer, then they must be with us."

Or perhaps its because the chances of Afghan forces being ready by 2011 are slim to none. And again, it's not purely the Afghan's fault.

Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Goehler is the head of a 12-man training team that since July has been mentoring Charlie kandak � Afghan for battalion � in Kabul�s capital division.

Goehler, a 24-year veteran of the special forces, described a disastrous situation that differed dramatically from the official projections. �They have been putting Band-Aids on this for a while,� he said.

On paper, Charlie kandak is one of six battalions in the brigade covering the 14 districts of Kabul and outlying areas. In reality, he revealed, only one other exists. Two kandaks are only at 30% capacity and are consequently not deployable. The final two are still �in the training pipeline�.

Decrepit Russian barracks at Kabul international airport have been earmarked for their arrival. The buildings lack running water and all the electrical fittings have been stripped. At any given moment, 20% to 30% of the 600 soldiers on Charlie kandak�s roster are absent without leave. In the Afghan army, a soldier can be missing for up to 60 days before any action � other than the suspension of his pay � is taken.

Illiteracy is high: 70% of inventory receipts are signed with a thumbprint. This engenders corruption because a soldier who cannot read has no idea what he has just confirmed receipt of.

Compounding the difficulties, senior commanders had so little understanding of the mentoring process that they were undermining the programme by breaking up teams that worked well together to plug holes elsewhere. �They�re ripping apart our teams,� said Goehler. �They [the Afghans] would be much further ahead if they had solid mentoring teams, the right people with the right experience.�

And finally, there's that question of Pakistan - or, more correctly, of what a massive Western armed force is doing on the useless side of the Afghan-Pakistan border if the objective is to reduce Al Qaeda's effectiveness. Mostly, Obama and his generals appear to be relying on hope. General David Petraeus, in an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep:

[Inskeep] Excuse me. Sure they're going after Taliban elements that they see as attacking inside Pakistan, but they're not going after the elements that we just described who are seen as attacking inside Afghanistan.

[Petraeus] In some cases they are. Again, it depends on whether those organizations, needless to say, have posed a threat to the writ of governance, as it's termed, of Pakistan. So in some cases there are literally mutual enemies; in some other cases there are elements that they have not yet gone after. And, in fact, I think we need to be very understanding of this, frankly.

There are � you can only stick so many short sticks into hornets' nests at one time. They have done quite impressive operations in Swat Valley or the North-West Frontier Province to clear and then hold and rebuild that very important area, again, of the NWFP � also several other districts of the Malakand division of the North-West Frontier Province.

They have also conducted operations against others of these extremist elements that are part of the syndicate that particularly does operate in, again, Northwestern Pakistan, Eastern Afghanistan. And those are in, say, the Bajaur, the Mohmand and the Khyber tribal agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Agency.

And then now they have gone after the Pakistani Taliban really in their home, which is Eastern-South Waziristan and now, in fact, they are actually operating in North Waziristan in some of the � in Aurakzai and Kuram of the FATA to go after some of the other organizations that have threatened their lines of communication in the FATA as they have carried out these other operations.

Inexorably, they are going after some of the other organizations because they are also threatening the writ of governance of Pakistan.

We should define that. They are going into, you believe, the area where this man, Siraj Haqqani, for example, is believed to be based.

Well, first of all, they have always had bases in that area. And frankly, what they have also had is they have had understandings with some of these different organizations, some of which is understandable.

I find myself hoping Petraeus is just being a political general, trying hard not to upset his Pakistani opposite numbers. He admits later in this interview that "these organizations were originally developed by Pakistani � particularly by the Inter-Services Intelligence organization, the ISI, with our money, during the days of the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan". But he seems to be entirely ignorant, at least for public consumption, of the dynamic that keeps Pakistan cosy with groups like the LeT and the Afghan Taliban. The simple truth is that Pakistan is preserving its (probably partial) control over regional extremist groups as a hedge against India. India really is a threat to Pakistan, partly because Pakistan is allied with China, which really is a threat to India.

Petraeus is publicly saying, like Mullen and others before him, that Pakistan has put the bad days behind itself and is now a whole-hearted ally in the War on Terror. It's exactly the same line that the Bush administration used to publicly take about Musharraf even as Musharaff's ISI intelligence agency was revitalizing its plans to regain its strategic depth in Afghanistan by resuming its political and military support for the Taliban.

And this last point is where, for me, Friedman really misses the wood for the trees. Petraeus' words prove that nothing has really changed since Musharraf's days, and nothing is likely to unless the geopolitical face-off between China and India, which is the prime current cause of the sub-continents proxy-war problems, is defused. That might require a shift in focus from the U.S. to concentrating upon diplomatic and economic means to leverage China and address the actual cause, rather than using military force to try to address the symptoms. Freidman might be stating the obvious but its not obvious enough - and he's missing the same bigger picture here that American security thinktanks and the Obama administration seem to be.