The American Empire Is Bankrupt

By Chris Hedges

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony. “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”

The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism … there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Dems: CIA may have misled Congress five times since 2001

The CIA may have misled Congress at least five times since 2001, two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday.

Intelligence subcommittee Chairwomen Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) are leading an ongoing investigation into what they described as a practice of incomplete and often misleading intelligence briefings, which arose in the wake of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s June 24 admission that intelligence officials failed to notify Congress about a top-secret program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders.

“That is an example of a failure to notify but we think a symptom of a larger disease,” Schakowsky said on Tuesday.

“There have been many instances where we’ve come to a committee hearing, after having read in the paper of something that should have been notified to us, where it’s followed up my mea culpas by the intelligence community,” Schakowsky said. “And examples where the committee actually has been lied to.

“You can understand that the committee has felt very frustrated that the executive branch has not notified us of intelligence activity,” she said. “We’re in the process of reviewing several instances where the executive branch may have violated the [notification] requirements that are in the National Security Act.”

One of the instances being closely examined by the two Democrats is the September 2002 briefing on enhanced interrogation techniques that became the basis for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) claim that the CIA lied to her. Findings on this point could bolster Pelosi’s case.

The Speaker came under fire after she said at a testy press conference in May that the CIA had lied to her and other members during a 2002 briefing about its use of waterboarding on detainees. Pelosi was the ranking member of the Intelligence panel at the time.

“We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she said at the May press conference. “They [the CIA] misled us all the time.”

Republicans demanded proof from Pelosi of CIA lies, and the Speaker was also criticized for not objecting to waterboarding when she first learned about it.

Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for the Pelosi, on Tuesday said that the Speaker’s May statement speaks for itself.

In June, CIA Director Leon Panetta alerted the House Intelligence Committee about a top-secret program to assassinate top al Qaeda operatives that previously had not been disclosed to Congress. Later reports indicated that former Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the CIA not to notify Congress of the program.

Panetta’s revelation appeared to bolster Pelosi’s statement from May, and Schakowsky and Eshoo identified “Director Panetta’s June 24 notification” as one of the five instances linked to a complete communication breakdown between the intelligence community and Congress.

“It is the policy of the Central Intelligence Agency to be clear and candid with the United States Congress,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in response to a request for comment. “Director Panetta has made a relationship of trust, confidence and respect a top priority.”

At least one of the CIA’s obfuscations was already known. A 2008 CIA Inspector General’s report determined that the agency withheld information from Congress relating to the shooting down of a plane carrying missionaries over Peru in 2001.

In addition, the CIA may have failed to properly notify Congress about the 2005 destruction of videotapes recording the interrogation of al Qaeda operatives by intelligence officials, Eshoo and Schakowsky said.

The New York Times Attempts to Screw Karzai and Afghanistan

New York Times today is trying to screw Afghanistan, much as the Kennedy administration attempted to screw South Vietnam. Let me explain this. New York Times story today: "'Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on CIA. Payroll' -- Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regularpayments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House. ... More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government."

Now, it is very clear that the New York Times, somebody -- this has gotta come from the White House, the Obama administration -- is trying to make sure that Karzai loses this runoff election. You know, we got rid of Musharraf. This bunch took care of getting Musharraf out of Pakistan, and Pakistan is collapsing, had to get rid of Musharraf. Now they want to get rid of Karzai by saying his brother is on the CIA payroll. But there are two brothers of Hamid Karzai, Ahmed and Mahmoud, and they have both spoken to Gerald Posner who writes to the Daily Beast, and they have denied everything. There is no way, they say, we're not being paid by the CIA. This is totally made up. So they are vociferously denying it. I'll tell you, folks, this has a distinct similarity to what the Democrat administration back in the days did to South Vietnam's Diem.

Now, I'm sure a lot of you do not know this, and those of you who do, do not remember it. "On orders from US President John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, refused to meet with Diem. Upon hearing that a coup d'etat was being designed by ARVN generals led by General Duong Van Minh, the United States gave secret assurances to the generals that the US would not interfere. Duong Van Minh and his co-conspirators overthrew the government on November 1, 1963. The coup was very swift. On November 1, 1963, with only the palace guard remaining to defend President Diem and his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the generals called the palace offering Diem safe exile out of the country if he surrendered. However, that evening, Diem and his entourage escaped via an underground passage to Cholon, where they were captured the following morning, November 2. The brothers were executed in the back of an armored personnel carrier by Captain Nguyen Van Nhung while en route to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters."

Now, the point here, "Upon learning of Diem’s ouster and death, Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said, 'I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.' The North Vietnamese Politburo was more explicit, predicting: 'The consequences of the 1 November coup d’etat will be contrary to the calculations of the US imperialists ... Diem was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Diem." Now, after Diem's assassination, which we stood by and let happen because we thought we'd be better off with another guy in there, "South Vietnam was unable to establish a stable government and numerous coups took place during the first several years after his death. While the US continued to influence South Vietnam’s government, the assassination bolstered North Vietnamese attempts to characterize the South Vietnamese as supporters of colonialism," and it went a long way toward harming the south's efforts to get the people in the south on their side.

The whole debacle, the same thing is happening. We're going to throw Afghanistan under the bus, for some reason Karzai is not liked -- probably because he's Bush's guy -- by Obama

Kerry: WH must brief Congress on CIA's relationship with Karzai's brother

By Tony Romm -

The possibility that the United States is receiving intelligence from a suspected Afghan drug trader raises "serious questions about the information Congress is receiving," the chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee said Wednesday.

The New York Times' recent discovery that Ahmed Wali Karzai -- brother to Afghan President Hamid Karazi -- is on the CIA payroll has riled many on Capitol Hill today. Although Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Wednesday took a more tempered tone, advising lawmakers not to prematurely condemn Wali Karzai, he is now calling on the Obama administration to reveal to Congress the extent of its relationship with the alleged informant.

“Senior American officials have told me repeatedly that there is no hard evidence linking Ahmed Wali Karzai to drug trafficking," Kerry said in a statement.

"However, after reading press accounts which allege that Mr. Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA, one of the agencies gathering intelligence about narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan, I have serious questions about the information that Congress is receiving," he added.

Wali Karzai's suspected involvement in Afghanistan's opium market is important, given the degree to which the drug trade dominates the local economy and funnels money to terrorist groups in the region. The Times' article alone estimates millions of dollars in opium money have exchanged hands since the United States entered the country in 2001, and combating trafficking is likely to be part of the Obama team's forthcoming, new strategy for Afghanistan.

The sheer magnitude of that situation alone, explained Kerry, ultimately proves why the Obama administration and Congress must now take the Times' article -- and observers' accusations about Wali Karzai's behavior -- very seriously.

“Reducing corruption and stopping the bribes from drug traffickers are absolutely essential to developing an effective Afghan government," Kerry said. "Just this week, three DEA agents gave their lives in the fight against drug trafficking, a chilling reminder of the sacrifices American civilians and troops make in Afghanistan."

The Deadly Insurgency in Iran's Backyard

India's Strategic Alliances

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The Boeing P-8A "Poseidon"

India is pivotal for U.S. efforts to create a geopolitical balance in South Asia. It creates a hedge against Chinese and Russian power and helps maintain the pressure on Pakistan.

The U.S. Challenge in Afghanistan

By George Friedman and Reva Bhalla

The decision over whether to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan may wait until the contested Afghan election is resolved, U.S. officials said Oct. 18. The announcement comes as U.S. President Barack Obama is approaching a decision on the war in Afghanistan. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Obama argued that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time, but Afghanistan was a necessary war. His reasoning went that the threat to the United States came from al Qaeda, Afghanistan had been al Qaeda’s sanctuary, and if the United States were to abandon Afghanistan, al Qaeda would re-establish itself and once again threaten the U.S. homeland. Withdrawal from Afghanistan would hence be dangerous, and prosecution of the war was therefore necessary.

After Obama took office, it became necessary to define a war-fighting strategy in Afghanistan. The most likely model was based on the one used in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility covers both Afghanistan and Iraq. Paradoxically, the tactical and strategic framework for fighting the so-called “right war” derived from U.S. military successes in executing the so-called “wrong war.” But grand strategy, or selecting the right wars to fight, and war strategy, or how to fight the right wars, are not necessarily linked.

Afghanistan, Iraq and the McChrystal Plan

Making sense of the arguments over Afghanistan requires an understanding of how the Iraq war is read by the strategists fighting it, since a great deal of proposed Afghan strategy involves transferring lessons learned from Iraq. Those strategists see the Iraq war as having had three phases. The first was the short conventional war that saw the defeat of Saddam Hussein's military. The second was the period from 2003-2006 during which the United States faced a Sunni insurgency and resistance from the Shiite population, as well as a civil war between those two communities. During this phase, the United States sought to destroy the insurgency primarily by military means while simultaneously working to scrape a national unity government together and hold elections. The third phase, which began in late 2006, was primarily a political phase. It consisted of enticing Iraqi Sunni leaders to desert the foreign jihadists in Iraq, splitting the Shiite community among its various factions, and reaching political -- and financial -- accommodations among the various factions. Military operations focused on supporting political processes, such as pressuring recalcitrant factions and protecting those who aligned with the United States. The troop increase -- aka the surge -- was designed to facilitate this strategy. Even more, it was meant to convince Iraqi factions (not to mention Iran) that the United States was not going to pull out of Iraq, and that therefore a continuing American presence would back up guarantees made to Iraqis.

It is important to understand this last bit and its effect on Afghanistan. As in Iraq, the idea that the United States will not abandon local allies by withdrawing until Afghan security forces could guarantee the allies' security lies at the heart of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, e.g., before local allies' security could be guaranteed, would undermine U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. To a great extent, the process of U.S. security guarantees in Afghanistan depends on the credibility of those guarantees: Withdrawal from Iraq followed by retribution against U.S. allies in Iraq would undermine the core of the Afghan strategy.

U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy in Afghanistan ultimately is built around the principle that the United States and its NATO allies are capable of protecting Afghans prepared to cooperate with Western forces. This explains why the heart of McChrystal's strategy involves putting U.S. troops as close to the Afghan people as possible. Doing so will entail closing many smaller bases in remote valleys -- like the isolated outpost recently attacked in Nuristan province -- and opening bases in more densely populated areas.

McChrystal's strategy therefore has three basic phases. In phase one, his forces would fight their way into regions where a large portion of the population lives and where the Taliban currently operates, namely Kabul, Khost, Helmand and Kandahar provinces. The United States would assume a strategic defensive posture in these populated areas. Because these areas are essential to the Taliban, phase two would see a Taliban counterattack in a bid to drive McChrystal's forces out, or at least to demonstrate that the U.S. forces cannot provide security for the local population. Paralleling the first two phases, phase three would see McChrystal using his military successes to forge alliances with indigenous leaders and their followers.

It should be noted that while McChrystal's traditional counterinsurgency strategy would be employed in populated areas, U.S. forces would also rely on traditional counterterrorism tactics in more remote areas where the Taliban have a heavy presence and can be pursued through drone strikes. The hope is that down the road, the strategy would allow the United States to use its military successes to fracture the Taliban, thereby encouraging defections and facilitating political reconciliation with Taliban elements driven more by political power than ideology.

There is a fundamental difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, however. In Iraq, resistance forces rarely operated in sufficient concentrations to block access to the population. By contrast, the Taliban on several occasions have struck with concentrations of forces numbering in the hundreds, essentially at company-size strength. If Iraq was a level one conflict, with irregular forces generally refusing conventional engagement with coalition forces, Afghanistan is beginning to bridge the gap from a level one to a level two conflict, with the Taliban holding territory with forces both able to provide conventional resistance and to mount some offensives at the company level (and perhaps at the battalion level in the future). This means that occupying, securing and defending areas such that the inhabitants see the coalition forces as defenders rather than as magnets for conflict is the key challenge.

Adding to the challenge, elements of McChrystal's strategy are in tension. First, local inhabitants will experience multilevel conflict as coalition forces move into a given region. Second, McChrystal is hoping that the Taliban goes on the offensive in response. And this means that the first and second steps will collide with the third, which is demonstrating to locals that the presence of coalition forces makes them more secure as conflict increases (which McChrystal acknowledges will happen). To convince locals that Western forces enhance their security, the coalition will thus have to be stunningly successful both at defeating Taliban defenders when they first move in and in repulsing subsequent Taliban attacks.

In its conflict with the Taliban, the coalition's main advantage is firepower, both in terms of artillery and airpower. The Taliban must concentrate its forces to attack the coalition; to counter such attacks, the weapons of choice are airstrikes and artillery. The problem with both of these weapons is first, a certain degree of inaccuracy is built into their use, and second, the attackers will be moving through population centers (the area held by both sides is important precisely because it has population). This means that air- and ground-fire missions, both important in a defensive strategy, run counter to the doctrine of protecting population.

McChrystal is fully aware of this dilemma, and he has therefore changed the rules of engagement to sharply curtail airstrikes in areas of concentrated population, even in areas where U.S. troops are in danger of being overrun. As McChrystal said in a recent interview, these rules of engagement will hold "Even if it means we are going to step away from a firefight and fight them another day."

This strategy poses two main challenges. First, it shifts the burden of the fighting onto U.S. infantry forces. Second, by declining combat in populated areas, the strategy runs the risk of making the populated areas where political arrangements might already be in place more vulnerable. In avoiding air and missile strikes, McChrystal avoids alienating the population through civilian casualties. But by declining combat, McChrystal risks alienating populations subject to Taliban offensives. Simply put, while airstrikes can devastate a civilian population, avoiding airstrikes could also devastate Western efforts, as local populations could see declining combat as a betrayal. McChrystal is thus stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place on this one.

One of his efforts at a solution has been to ask for more troops. The point of these troops is not to occupy Afghanistan and impose a new reality through military force, which is impossible (especially given the limited number of troops the United States is willing to dedicate to the problem). Instead, it is to provide infantry forces not only to hold larger areas, but to serve as reinforcements during Taliban attacks so the use of airpower can be avoided. Putting the onus of this counterinsurgency on the infantry, and having the infantry operate without airpower, is a radical departure from U.S. fighting doctrine since World War II.

Seismic Shift in War Doctrine

Geopolitically, the United States fights at the end of a long supply line. Moreover, U.S. forces operate at a demographic disadvantage. Once in Eurasia, U.S. forces are always outnumbered. Infantry-on-infantry warfare is attritional, and the United States runs out of troops before the other side does. Infantry warfare does not provide the United States any advantage, and in fact, it places the United States at a disadvantage. Opponents of the United States thus have larger numbers of fighters; greater familiarity and acclimation to the terrain; and typically, better intelligence from countrymen behind U.S. lines. The U.S. counter always has been force multipliers -- normally artillery and airpower -- capable of destroying enemy concentrations before they close with U.S. troops. McChrystal's strategy, if applied rigorously, shifts doctrine toward infantry-on-infantry combat. His plan assumes that superior U.S. training will be the force multiplier in Afghanistan (as it may). But that assumes that the Taliban, a light infantry force with numerous battle-hardened formations optimized for fighting in Afghanistan, is an inferior infantry force. And it assumes that U.S. infantry fighting larger concentrations of Taliban forces will consistently defeat them.

Obviously, if McChrystal drives the Taliban out of secured areas and into uninhabited areas, the United States will have a tremendous opportunity to engage in strategic bombardment both against Taliban militants themselves and against supply lines no longer plugged into populated areas. But this assumes that the Taliban would not reduce its operations from company-level and higher assaults down to guerrilla-level operations in response to being driven out of population centers. If the Taliban did make such a reduction, it would become indistinguishable from the population. This would allow it to engage in attritional warfare against coalition forces and against the protected population to demonstrate that coalition forces can't protect them. The Taliban already has demonstrated the ability to thrive in both populated and rural areas of Afghanistan, where the terrain favors the insurgent far more than the counterinsurgent.

The strategy of training Afghan soldiers and police to take up the battle and persuading insurgents to change sides faces several realities. The Taliban has an excellent intelligence service built up during the period of its rule and afterward, allowing it to populate the new security forces with its agents and loyalists. And while persuading insurgents to change sides certainly can happen, whether it can happen to the extent of leaving the Taliban materially weakened remains in doubt. In Iraq, this happened not because of individual changes, but because regional ethnic leadership -- with their own excellent intelligence capabilities -- changed sides and drove out opposing factions. Individual defections were frequently liquidated.

But Taliban leaders have not shown any inclination for changing sides. They do not believe the United States is in Afghanistan to stay. Getting individual Taliban militants to change sides creates an intelligence-security battle. But McChrystal is betting that his forces will form bonds with the local population so deep that the locals will provide intelligence against Taliban forces operating in the region. The coalition must thus demonstrate that the risks of defection are dwarfed by the advantages. To do this, the coalition security and counterintelligence must consistently and effectively block the Taliban's ability to identify, locate and liquidate defectors. If McChrystal cannot do that, large-scale defection will be impossible, because well before such defection becomes large scale, the first defectors will be dead, as will anyone seen by the Taliban as a collaborator.

Ultimately, the entire strategy depends on how you read Iraq. In Iraq, a political decision was made by an intact Sunni leadership able to enforce its will among its followers. Squeezed between the foreign jihadists who wanted to usurp their position and the Shia, provided with political and financial incentives, and possessing their own forces able to provide a degree of security themselves, the Sunni leadership came to the see the Americans as the lesser evil. They controlled a critical mass, and they shifted. McChrystal has made it clear that the defections he expects are not a Taliban faction whose leadership decides to shift, but Taliban soldiers as individuals or small groups. That isn't ultimately what turned the Iraq war but something very different -- and quite elusive in counterinsurgency. He is looking for retail defections to turn into a strategic event.

Moreover, it seems much too early to speak of the successful strategy in Iraq. First, there is increasing intracommunal violence in anticipation of coming elections early next year. Second, some 120,000 U.S. forces remain in Iraq to guarantee the political and security agreements of 2007-2008, and it is far from clear what would happen if those troops left. Finally, where in Afghanistan there is the Pakistan question, in Iraq there remains the Iran question. Instability thus becomes a cross-border issue beyond the scope of existing forces.

The Pakistan situation is particularly problematic. If the strategic objective of the war in Afghanistan is to cut the legs out from under al Qaeda and deny these foreign jihadists sanctuary, then what of the sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal belt where high-value al Qaeda targets are believed to be located? Pakistan is fighting its share of jihadists according to its own rules; the United States cannot realistically expect Islamabad to fulfill its end of the bargain in containing al Qaeda. The primary U.S. targets in this war are on the wrong side of the border, and in areas where U.S. forces are not free to operate. The American interest in Afghanistan is to defeat al Qaeda and prevent the emergence of follow-on jihadist forces. The problem is that regardless of how secure Afghanistan is, jihadist forces can (to varying degrees) train and plan in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia -- or even Cleveland for that matter. Securing Afghanistan is thus not necessarily a precondition for defeating al Qaeda.

Iraq is used as the argument in favor of the new strategy in Afghanistan. What happened in Iraq was that a situation that was completely out of hand became substantially less unstable because of a set of political accommodations initially rejected by the Americans and the Sunnis from 2003-2006. Once accepted, a disastrous situation became an unstable situation with many unknowns still in place.

If the goal of Afghanistan is to forge the kind of tenuous political accords that govern Iraq, the factional conflicts that tore Iraq apart are needed. Afghanistan certainly has factional conflicts, but the Taliban, the main adversary, does not seem to be torn by them. It is possible that under sufficient pressure such splits might occur, but the Taliban has been a cohesive force for a generation. When it has experienced divisions, it hasn't split decisively.

On the other hand, it is not clear that Western forces in Afghanistan can sustain long-term infantry conflict in which the offensive is deliberately ceded to a capable enemy and where airpower's use is severely circumscribed to avoid civilian casualties, overturning half a century of military doctrine of combined arms operations.

The Bigger Picture

The best argument for fighting in Afghanistan is powerful and similar to the one for fighting in Iraq: credibility. The abandonment of either country will create a powerful tool in the Islamic world for jihadists to argue that the United States is a weak power. Withdrawal from either place without a degree of political success could destabilize other regimes that cooperate with the United States. Given that, staying in either country has little to do with strategy and everything to do with the perception of simply being there.

The best argument against fighting in either country is equally persuasive. The jihadists are right: The United States has neither the interest nor forces for long-term engagements in these countries. American interests go far beyond the Islamic world, and there are many present (to say nothing of future) threats from outside the region that require forces. Overcommitment in any one area of interest at the expense of others could be even more disastrous than the consequences of withdrawal.

In our view, Obama's decision depends not on choosing between McChrystal's strategy and others, but on a careful consideration of how to manage the consequences of withdrawal. An excellent case can be made that now is not the time to leave Afghanistan, and we expect Obama to be influenced by that thinking far more than by the details of McChrystal's strategy. As McChrystal himself points out, there are many unknowns and many risks in his own strategy; he is guaranteeing nothing.

Reducing American national strategy to the Islamic world, or worse, Afghanistan, is the greater threat. Nations find their balance, and the heavy pressures on Obama in this decision basically represent those impersonal forces battering him. The question he must ask himself is simple: In what way is the future of Afghanistan of importance to the United States? The answer that securing it will hobble al Qaeda is simply wrong. U.S. Afghan policy will not stop a global terrorist organization; terrorists will just go elsewhere. The answer that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is important in shaping the Islamic world's sense of American power is better, but even that must be taken in context of other global interests.

Obama does not want this to be his war. He does not want to be remembered for Afghanistan the way George W. Bush is remembered for Iraq or Lyndon Johnson is for Vietnam. Right now, we suspect Obama plans to demonstrate commitment, and to disengage at a more politically opportune time. Johnson and Bush showed that disengagement after commitment is nice in theory. For our part, we do not think there is an effective strategy for winning in Afghanistan, but that McChrystal has proposed a good one for "hold until relieved." We suspect that Obama will hold to show that he gave the strategy a chance, but that the decision to leave won't be too far off.

Pakistan joins the American Raj

by Eric S. Margolis WASHINGTON: Official Washington watches in mounting alarm and confusion as Pakistan spins out of control. The US-led war in Afghanistan has now poured over into Pakistan, bringing that nation of 167 million close to civil war. Bombings and shootings are rocking Pakistan’s northwest regions, including a brazen attack on army HQ in Rawalpindi and repeated bombings of Lahore and Peshawar. Pakistan’s army has launched a major offensive against rebellious Pashtun tribes in South Waziristan. Meanwhile, the weak, deeply unpopular government of Asif Zardari that was engineered into power by the US faces an increasingly rancorous confrontation with its own military. Like the proverbial bull in the china shop, the Obama administration and US Congress chose this explosive time to try to impose yet another layer of American control over Pakistan – just as Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama appears likely to send thousands more US troops to Afghanistan. Tragically, US policy in the Muslim world continues to be driven by imperial arrogance, profound ignorance, and special interest groups. The current Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill approved by Congress and signed by Obama is ham-fisted dollar diplomacy at its worst. Pakistan, bankrupted by corruption and feudal landlords, is being offered US$7.5 billion over five years. Washington claims there are no strings attached. Except, of course, that the US wants to build a mammoth new embassy for 1,000 personnel in Islamabad, the second largest after its giant fortress-embassy in Baghdad. New diplomatic personnel are needed, claims Washington, to monitor the US$7.5 billion in aid. So a small army of US mercenaries is being brought in to protect US "interests". New US military bases will open. Most of the billions in new aid will go right into the pockets of the pro-western ruling establishment, about 1% of the population. Washington has been also demanding veto power over promotions in Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence agency, ISI. This crude attempt to take control of Pakistan’s proud, 617,000-man military and intelligence service has enraged its armed forces. It’s all part of Washington’s "Afpak" strategy to clamp tighter control over restive Pakistan and make use its armed forces and intelligence agents in Afghanistan. The other key US objective is seizing control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the cornerstone of its national defence against much more powerful India. Welcome, Pakistan, to the American Raj. However, 90% of Pakistanis oppose the US-led war in Afghanistan, and see Taliban and its allies as national resistance to western occupation. Alarmingly, violent attacks on Pakistan’s government are coming not only from once autonomous Pashtun tribes (wrongly called "Taliban") in Northwest Frontier Province, but, increasingly, in the biggest province, Punjab. Recently, the US Ambassador in Islamabad, in a fit of imperial arrogance, actually called for air attacks on Pashtun leaders in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province. Washington does not even bother to ask the Islamabad government’s permission to launch air attacks inside Pakistan, only informing it afterwards. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman Big Bribe comes as many irate Pakistanis accuse President Asif Ali Zardari’s government of being American hirelings. Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, has been dogged for decades by corruption charges. Washington seems unaware of the fury its crude, counter-productive policies have whipped up in Pakistan. The Obama administration listens to Washington-based pro-Israel neo-conservatives, military hawks, and "experts" who tell it what it wants to hear, not the facts. Pakistan’s military, the nation’s premier institution, is being pushed to the point of revolt. Against the backdrop of bombings and shootings come rumours the heads of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence may be replaced. Pakistanis are calling for the removal of the Zardari regime’s strongman, Interior Minister Rehman Malik. The possibility of a military coup against the Zardari regime grows. But Pakistan is dependent on US money, and fears India. Can its generals afford to break with patron Washington? Eric S. Margolis is a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East and South Asia. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=39233

SkyEye surveillance platform completes first test flight

Aerial Surveillance Systems Inc (ASSI) has successfully carried out the first flight of its SkyEye 350 aerial surveillance and special mission aircraft, the company announced on 19 October.

The SkyEye 350, which is based on the Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350 twin-engined turboprop aircraft, is being developed as an advanced aerial surveillance platform for the US Department of Defense (DoD) and unspecified international customers.

ASSI announced in July that it had selected FLIR Systems to provide the aircraft's electro-optical (EO) sensors and Stevens Aviation to provide maintenance, repair and support.

Stevens Aviation will also be responsible for the certification and integration of the platform, including the Special Mission Cargo Pod (SMCP), avionics upgrade, EO sensor installation and mission control hardware.

For this first flight a modified version of the FLIR Systems BRITE Star II EO/infrared (IR) targeting sensor was fitted to the aircraft.

The modified EO/IR sensor package will capture stabilised high-magnification images that allow the SkyEye 350 to provide a wide range of low-, medium-, and high-altitude tactical missions and long-range covert surveillance operations.

The FLIR Systems Star SAFIRE day/night Multi-Mission Optical Stabilized Payload (MMOSP) can also be integrated depending on the customer's needs.

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Same old mistakes in new Afghan war

Soviet military archives show latest international intervention in Afghanistan has learnt nothing from the war two decades ago
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
The Observer, Sunday


Korengal Valley, Afghanistan.


Eight years into the war in Afghanistan: the most senior defence official running the conflict receives a letter from one of his officers. It is a depressing list of political and tactical failures.
"We should honestly admit," he writes, "that our efforts over the last eight years have not led to the expected results. Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result – stabilisation of military-political situation in the country. The protracted character of the military struggle and the absence of any serious success, which could lead to a breakthrough in the entire strategic situation, led to the formation in the minds of the majority of the population of the mistrust in the abilities of the regime."
"The experience of the past years," he continues bleakly, "clearly shows that the Afghan problem cannot be solved by military means only. We should decisively reject our illusions and undertake principally new steps, taking into account the lessons of the past, and the real situation in the country..."
The date is 17 August… 1987. The writer is Colonel K. Tsagalov and he is addressing the newly appointed Soviet defence minister, Dmitry Yazov.
Fast-forward 22 years to the confidential briefing paper prepared for President Barack Obama by the senior US general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, in August 2009, eight years into the US-led intervention in Afghanistan.
"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and Isaf's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government," McChrystal argued in a document leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. He said the consequence had been a "crisis of confidence among Afghans. Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents".
The American led-effort, wrote McChrystal, echoing Tsaglov, was labouring under its own illusions regarding its competence. "Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. [Nato and the US] does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population." The war was in danger of being lost.
In Washington the talk in recent weeks has been of a "Vietnam moment". Commentators have pored over new studies of that war, looking deep into the heart of one US military debacle in order to think their way out of another. But what if Afghanistan – as Artemy Kalinovsky argued in Foreign Policy magazine last month – is not the new Vietnam but rather "the new Afghanistan"?
Should not US and British policy makers be studying the lessons of the Soviet Union's disastrous war from 1979-89, if they want to avoid history's mistakes?
Kalinovsky writes: "The US army/marine corps counterinsurgency field manual does not mention the Soviet experience once. One analyst told me that when she suggested including the conflict as a way to inform current policy, Pentagon officials seemed to have little awareness about what Moscow had been trying to do there or for how long.
Yet, to cite one parallel, McChrystal has just announced he wants to relocate isolated firebases – including one at Kamdesh that came close to being overwhelmed by Taliban fighters on 3 October – to relocate troops in population centres. The Russians, confronted by a widening conflict, were forced to adopt the same strategy.
The Soviet war, at its conclusion, cost more than a million Afghan lives, 26,000 Soviet soldiers died and more than five million Afghans fled the devastated country. Soviet troop numbers reached 108,000 at their peak. True, the mujahideen, unlike the Taliban today, benefited from US and other foreign military aid. And the present conflict has lacked the same intensity, with 800 US soldiers killed and more than 220 Britons, in addition to thousands of Afghans.
But while the scale is different, a study of Soviet archives shows the intellectual failures associated with both wars are the same, a point reinforced by the official history of the Soviet war, prepared by Russia's general staff after the retreat.
"The Soviet government and the Soviet high command," its authors bitterly observed, "did not study Afghanistan's national-historic factors before committing Soviet forces. If they had, they would have found a history of many centuries of resisting various conquerors. The Afghan considers any foreigner carrying weapons as an alien occupier."
The reality too, as Kalinovsky argued last month, is that neither the Russians nor the Americans intended to become embroiled in long wars. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who ordered the Soviet invasion to bring down the brutal Afghan communist president, Hafizullah Amin, in 1979, hoped troops could be home within months, leaving military and other advisers – backed by huge economic and logistical support – to build a communist government that could stand on its own feet. It was an error repeated by the US-led efforts to rebuild the country as a democratic state.
Professor Chris Bellamy of Cranfield University – an expert on Soviet military history, whose students include serving British army officers – is one of many struck by the similarities. "I remember meeting a Russian general after the Soviet war," he recalled. "He said to me – we should have read Kipling! Now it has come round again, we should have read the Soviet history of Afghanistan."
Belatedly, said Bellamy, his institution had been approached to run a course for British officers en route to Afghanistan on the country's culture and society.
The Soviet preoccupation with Afghanistan – even in the months before the invasion as the number of Soviet military advisers reached thousands – seems strikingly familiar. At a meeting in the Kremlin on 1 April 1979, after an uprising in Herat against the Afghan communist government, Moscow's most senior officials, including Brezhnev, considered a report by foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, defence minister Dmitry Ustinov and KGB director Yuri Andropov. Their analysis – as prescient then as today – described a country in which "Afghan reactionary forces [were] skilfully taking advantage of the almost complete illiteracy of the population, complex international and inter-tribal conflicts, religious fanaticism and nationalism".
It depicted a mujahideen insurgency in transition – as the neo-Taliban insurgency would also develop – "from covert subversive actions to open armed forms of activity" the aim of which was to "widen the front of the struggle, to force the government to disperse its forces across different regions".
Just as western officials now home in on the failings of the Hamid Karzai regime three decades later, the Soviet leadership lamented the lack of legitimacy and authority of their man in Kabul – Nur Mohammad Taraki – recommending, as US and British officials would do later, that the primary task of the Afghan leaders was to "create a new state apparatus, reorganise and strengthen the army and gather practical experience in building a state and party".
It was this desire – insistence on a modern, centralised state similar to the one the international community would seek – that the Soviet Union realised was one of the biggest factors to its catastrophe in Afghanistan.
As a result, in both conflicts foreign forces have found themselves propping up a minority grouping with unsustainable claims to nationwide legitimacy. Russia backed the narrowly represented supporters of the PDPA, the fractious and divided Afghan communist party; now Nato has promoted a small elite surrounding Karzai's weak government.
"The similarities are striking," said Gregory Feifer, American author of The Great Gamble, a highly praised new history of the Soviet intervention. "I am reminded of it every time I hear an official talk about national reconciliation. The Soviets spoke about nothing else for nine years. But the goals were different, if the tactics often were similar."
Reading translations of the Soviet record at the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project in the US, it is not only the obvious points of comparison that stand out but the detail. Just as US and Nato forces would struggle after the new Taliban insurgency to prevent fighters returning to areas already cleared, the Russians suffered a similar problem while officers complained about the quality of their Afghan army comrades.
Soviet officials complain of not being able to win on the battlefield decisively and of losing the "propaganda war". Recently US envoy Richard Holbrooke and McChrystal have talked of the need "to wrest the information initiative from the Taliban and other groups".
Arne Westad, the London School of Economics history professor who was one of the first to study the Soviet archive, is "constantly stunned" by the parallels. "I remember interviewing a member of the presidium of the Soviet foreign ministry, who dissented from the official line. He warned [the Soviets] that they needed to examine the British experience in Afghanistan and was derided. He was told: it is not the same. It was a different army. But it is [the same]."
Westad is concerned that while the Russians began to demonstrate a more flexible military approach after 1983, Nato and US forces appear to be slower to adapt. In particular, there has been a refusal to lose the old obsession with establishing a unified, "modern" state. Afghanistan is a tribal society where power traditionally has been mediated through qawm – overlapping local patronage networks – and where attempts to carve out a modern state, first tried by the autocratic Mohammad Daoud Khan in the 1970s, until the present day have been a motor for conflict. "It is the biggest problem," he said. "It is like trying to fit a saddle on a cow."
By the time Colonel Tsaglov put pen to paper, Mikhail Gorbachev, shocked by the failure of the intervention and increasing public anger at Russian losses, had already decided to pull out. This week, by contrast, Obama is expected to announce his decision to escalate the war and send yet more soldiers. In the end it was the endless death toll – as much as the crippling cost – that persuaded Gorbachev to call for withdrawal.
Anatoly Chernaev, a close colleague of Gorbachev, recorded the moment in his diary on 17 October 1985 after attending the Politburo meeting. "[Gorbachev] read several heart-rending letters… There is a good deal of everything [in the letters]: international duty?! For what? Do the Afghans themselves want us to fulfil this duty? And is this duty worth the lives of our boys, who do not understand what they are fighting for? Besides the letters filled with tears, mothers' grief over the dead and the crippled, heart-rending descriptions of funerals, there are letters of accusation: the Politburo made a mistake and it should be rectified, the sooner the better."
Thirty years after Russian troops entered Afghanistan to remove a government, Nato, like the Soviets, is confronted by ethnic divisions, corruption and weak government; by a population of which large parts are hostile to foreign intervention and hostile to attempts to modernise and centralise the state.
With troop commitments creeping towards the Soviet total, the unanswered question is whether this war can end in a different manner to the predecessor it mirrors in such startling fashion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/18/afghan-war-soviet-invasion-mistakes