Afghanistan

Thursday

Alex Massie

Vietnam Watch: Ben Macintyre

An occasional series deploring pundits’ determination to treat the curret Afghan campaign as though it were a replay of the Vietnam War. Today’s episode disappoints me since I have a considerable regard for Ben Macintyre. Nevertheless, his column in the Times today is, right from the get-go, a classic of the genre: An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up. Oh dear. The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Afghanistan: A Modest Case for Dithering

My old chum, and former boss, Iain Martin writes that time is, in fact, of the essence in Afghanistan and that Barack Obama needs to make a decision: We cannot go on like this indefinitely – making some progress but never winning, especially when money is so tight. We need to either commit more troops and firepower, get a move on, surge troop numbers, take the fight anew to the Taliban and aim for victory. Or if we don’t fancy that we can slim down our presence dramatically, fund the anti-Talban forces and back them up with special forces support and airpower. The worst option appears to be staying in

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Karzai the Envoy Slayer

I have just returned from DC, where the talk of the town, or at least of the foreign policy community, is how long Richard Holbrooke has left in the Obama administration. A well-connected friend suggested The Bulldozer has, at most, two months left. Perhaps most telling has been Holbrooke’s absence in the recent efforts to persuade Hamid Karzai to accept a second round of voting in the presidential election. The Economist hailed John Kerry’s impromptu diplomacy, which secured Karzai’s consent and gave Holbrooke the epithet “now-absent”. Diplomats I have spoken to say President Karzai is currently refusing to see Holbrooke at all, possibly sensing a chance to divide and weaken

Saturday

David Blackburn

For want of leadership and a clear aim

A Channel Four News You Gov poll suggests that an overwhelming 84 percent of the public think that the war in Afghanistan is being lost and that British troops specifically are not winning in Helmand. Just because a large majority think that British troops are losing the fight does not mean that the public are not behind the forces’ efforts, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement and British servicemen deserve support. But, this poll should send a clear message to the cross-party consensus in this country and Nato leadership that the current ill-defined strategy is failing. It is telling that Jeremy Corbyn MP, vice-chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,

David Blackburn

The Tories’ support for the war in Afghanistan owes nothing to neo-conservatism

In his column in the Mail, Peter Oborne writes that Cameron’s stance on Afghanistan represents the same mistake made by IDS in his unstinting support for the Iraq war. Oborne fears that neo-conservatism has gripped the Tory leadership. ‘The ‘Neocons’, despite being discredited by the Iraq war, have furtively regained their position at the heart of the Tory party. Almost without exception, Cameron’s senior team are passionate Atlanticists who seem committed to the policy of ‘reinforcement of failure’ in Afghanistan. Both the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox are ‘Neocons’. As are Cameron’s two most trusted Shadow Cabinet colleagues, Michael Gove and George Osborne.’

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rory Stewart & Mr Micawber in Afghanistan

From an interesting Jason Zengerle piece in the New Republic: And yet, for all his obvious ambition, Stewart believes the key to any successful U.S. policy in Afghanistan is modesty. “What muddling through is really about is recognizing that we don’t have all the answers,” he says. “It’s not as if we have some amazing high modernist ideology that we’re kind of engineers of the human soul or central planners who are going to come out and create an ideal state. We don’t have that ideological certainty, we don’t know what we’re trying to do, nor do we actually have the power. We don’t have the kind of authoritarian weight

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Repeating the same mistakes

The BBC reports that President Karzai has given into mounting pressure and called a run-off, to be held on the 7th November. My gut instinct is that the run-off will prove a costly mistake, in terms of money, men and politics. The sole purpose of these elections is to emphasise that Kabul is the centre of government. That the government’s writ hardly extends beyond the bazaar and its authors are discredited is neither here nor there. It is plain that elements of the Taliban are fighting to protect judicial rights from Kabul’s interference; and presumably, these warlords can be bought through a combination of cash and administrative privileges. As Paddy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hard-line Taliban are not ‘al Qaeda lite’

David Rohde’s account of being held hostage by the Taliban for seven months is a fantastic piece of journalism, I’d urge you to read the whole thing. One point in it struck me as particularly pertinent to the current debate about Afghanistan: “Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the

Monday

David Blackburn

The political position in Kabul deteriorates

It seems that a second Afghan election is now probable after Hamid Karzai’s share of the vote fell below 50%. The BBC reports that the drop is the result of the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission ordering that ballots from 210 polling stations be discounted. The pro-Karsi Independent Electoral Commission will deliver its verdict shortly, but is bound by the ECC, so a run-off seems likely. This turn of events is no surprise – rumours of corruption circulated months before polling. But the coalition is now in a very awkward position. Mr Karzai’s state of mind is frenetic – he views these allegations as more evidence that there is an Anglo-American

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Generals & Their Plan of Attack

Actually, the General Staff’s manoeuvres on Fleet Street have, alas, been rather more successful than their efforts in Basra and Helmand province. I commend*, therefore, Paul Robinson’s article in this week’s edition of the magazine in which he argues that the Generals must take their share of responsibility for recent military failures. More provocatively still he suggests the Army has been saved by Labour since without Tony Blair’s zeal for expeditionary warfare it’s not quite clear what the army would be for these days. There’s something to that in as much as I suspect that if Blair had not committed us to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the MoD

Wednesday

David Blackburn

500 more troops to Afghanistan

Gordon Brown’s Afghanistan and Pakistan statement was virtually identical to the joint statement he gave with Battlin’ Bob in August. Once again, the government are pinning their hopes on a tactic called “Afghanisation” – by which they mean conducting operations alongside Afghan forces and police, and the steady extension of Kabul’s authority into the localities. I’ve debated this before, but I doubt that an Afghan police force that is drug tested because its officers consume opium prodigiously can be relied upon to even hand out parking tickets; and, more importantly, Nato’s strategy rests on the contestable assumption that ordinary Afghans believe that Afghanistan exists as a political entity and that

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why are the Pakistani Taliban being given another opening?

There is a depressingly predictable story in The New York Times today about reconstruction in the Swat Valley. Here’s the key section: “the real test of Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban in Swat will take place here, in the impoverished villages where the militant movement began. But more than two months after the end of active combat, with winter fast approaching, reconstruction has yet to begin, and little has been accomplished on the ground to win back people’s trust, villagers and local officials say. The lag, they argue, is risky: It was a sense of near-total abandonment by the government that opened people to the Taliban to begin with, they

Friday

James Forsyth

Peace in our time

When I first saw the headline Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize, I thought I must have read it wrong. After all, what has Obama actually accomplished in his first nine months in office? (Obviously, that’s not to say he won’t accomplish foreign policy successes in his time in office but he certainly hasn’t yet).   On the foreign policy front, Obama is not actually having much success. Having announced Afghan strategy months into his presidency, he is now reviewing it and seems intent on second-guessing the new commander he appointed. Also for all the goodwill towards him in Europe, he has not got the Europeans to commit substantially more resources

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Defensive moves

So, General Dannatt is to be a Tory Peer. This worries me greatly. On balance, General Dannatt did a good job as Army chief. Not a great job, but a good one. His interventions boosted the morale of frontline troops and his concern for the care of soldiers, especially the wounded, was important. Conversely, many defense analysts thought he was too cautious on military reform, blocking the Army’s transformation into an effective counter-insurgency force and opposing stop gap procurement in case it compromised future acquisition projects. But the real concerns over General Dannatt’s ennoblement are different. General Dannatt should have given his sucecssor a clear run at the job. He should

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Man Who Would Be a Peer: General Sir Richard Dannatt

Plenty of Tories are, it seems, cock-a-hoop about the news, still to be confirmed, that General Sir Richard Dannatt is to be elevated to the House of Lords where he will become a Tory defence adviser and, perhaps, a minister in the next Conservative government. And, in fairness, one can see why the Conservatives would be so pleased. There’s no-one on the Labour benches who brings as much firepower to the political battlefield as General Dannatt. Yet if the government’s criticisms of General Dannatt were, at times, unseemly then so too was his very public dissension from (aspects of)  government policy at a time when he was, after all, in

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Dannatt may be overstating his case, but the government is being disingenuous

General Sir Richard Dannatt issues a vociferous condemnation of the government’s commitment to British efforts in Afghanistan in the print edition of today’s Sun. Dannatt asserts that Gordon Brown vetoed increasing the British deployment by 2,000 troops, against the advice of military chiefs. He told the paper: “The military advice has been for an uplift since the beginning of 2009. If the military says we need more troops and we can supply them, then frankly they should take that advice and deploy up to the level we recommend. “If it means finding more resources and putting more energy in, let’s do it. If you’re going to conduct an operation, you’re

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Despite Pundits’ Best Efforts, Afghanistan Stubbornly Refuses to be Obama’s Vietnam

So, you see, Barack Obama is a Democratic president just like Jack Kennedy and LBJ and, right, there’s a war going on in Aghanistan which is in asia, just like Vietnam! So the parallels are just uncanny. Right? Wrong. It’s time, people. for a comprehensive ban on making facile comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Prospect’s Tom Streithorst is only the latest fellow to warn that Afghanistan “could destroy Obama’s presidency, as Vietnam did Johnson’s.” This seems extremely unlikely. Let’s trot through some of the reasons: 1. 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam. The current figure for Afghanistan? 796. There may be quite a number of troops involved but Afghanistan is, by

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Was Rory Stewart an MI6 Officer?

Was Rory Stewart, Harvard Professor, author of The Places In Between and prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the Bracknell constituency, an MI6 officer? Former-ambassador-turned-conspiracist Craig Murray says he was: One person I would not vote for is the crusading neo-Conservative Rory Stewart. It is particularly annoying that he is constantly referred to as a former diplomat. Stewart was an MI6 officer and not a member of the FCO. Three years ago I received a message from the FCO asking me not to mention this as, at that time, Stewart was still very active for MI6 in Afghanistan and his life could have been endangered. I agreed, and even removed a

Friday

James Forsyth

Mackay and the special relationship

The news that General Andrew Mackay has quit over the government’s failure to properly equip the Afghan mission is significant. For one thing, it will have ramifications for the UK US military relationship. Mackay is the British general from whom General Petraeus feels he has learnt the most; Petraeus affectionately called him the “King of Scotland” in his Policy Exchange lecture the other week. Mackay’s departure will increase the US military’s concern about the war-fighting capabilities of the British military.

David Blackburn

Dereliction of duty

The Ministry of Defence is the subject of two very damaging stories this morning. First, there are twice as many former service personnel in prison than there were six years ago. And second, Major General Andrew Mackay, a former commanding officer in Helmand, who masterminded the recapture of Musa Qala, has resigned his commission. Mackay is understood to have been dismayed at the direction of the war and army restructuring. The Independent has the details: ‘Mackay was disillusioned with what he considered to be a failure to carry out adequate reconstruction and development in Helmand. He had said privately that British soldiers risking their lives in the conflict had been