The Campaign to Pardon Jonathan Pollard

There seems to be a steadily growing chorus (including Mr. Netanyahu's government) clamoring for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a Naval Intelligence analysis who in 1986 was convicted of handing over to the Israeli government highly classified information.  (And this, apparently, after a series of incidents  in which he tried to set up deals with agents of other countries.)  By all accounts, the damage that he did to US military intelligence was huge.  Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorist expert and analyst with the CIA, puts it plainly:

Pollard did more damage to the United States than any spy in history.  And it was genuine damage, not just a mass of documents that had been routinely classified.  Pollard’s Israeli handler, aided by someone in the White House who has up until now evaded arrest, was able to ask for specific classified documents by name and number.  The Soviets obtained US war plans, passed to them by the Israelis in exchange for money and free emigration of Russian Jews without any regard for the damage it was doing to the United States.  The KGB was able to use the mass of information to reconstruct US intelligence operations directed against it and a number of Americans and US agents paid with their lives.  Pollard also revealed to the Israelis and Soviets the technical and human source capabilities that US intelligence did and did not have, which is the most critical information of all as it underlies all information collection efforts.  Compounding the problem, the United States has never actually been able to accurately ascertain all of the damage done by Pollard because the Israeli government has refused to cooperate in the investigation and has not returned the documents that were stolen.

Israel granted him citizenship in the 1990s, even as he was in prison.  A public square in Israel is named after him.

Yet a few days ago, the LA Times published an op-ed piece by Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan administration official, pleading for Pollard's release on essentially humanitarian grounds, as well as on the basis of the claim made by former CIA head James Woolsey (one of the more extreme neocons and American Likudniks of the 1990s and post 9-11 era, I might note, as well as a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy - DC's most pro-Zionist think-tank and the Project for the New American Century) that the information Pollard sold never made it into the hands of Soviet agents, as Giraldi claims.  In fact, Bill Clinton came close to making a deal with Israel to release Pollard in hopes of advancing a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians - only to back off when CIA chief George Tenet threatened to resign.

Obama is getting pressure to make a similar deal, for similar reasons.  He shouldn't.  For one thing, whatever Obama might get for Pollard's release won't be anywhere near enough to produce an actual deal. (Netanyahu might offer some prolongation of the already expired settlement freeze; but don't hold your breath.)  Meanwhile, a US citizen who spied for a foreign power that claims to be a US ally, and whose actions imperiled US security and possibly caused the deaths of CIA assets, would be welcomed to Israel with open arms and honored as a national hero.  Some of Obama's current foes might praise him for supposedly doing the right thing, but I suspect that far more of his foes, and his friends (including members of the current US intelligence establishment) would revile him for giving into Netanyahu, who's already shown himself quite capable of dissing an American president.  Any shreds of credibility that Obama might still have as a strong leader on the international scene would vanish.

Glimpse of Baghdad's Future?

Glimpse of Baghdad's future? Some liberalization on the streets, but militants ready to be called out? As in Hizbollah in Lebanon?

Obama undercuts his promise - and "American Values" - again

The AP reports that the US has decided to exempt several countries - including Yemen and Sudan - from its law penalizes countries for using child soldiers (a law, BTW, that Senator Obama supported as it made its way through Congress).  The rationale evidently is that enforcement would contravene US "national interests."

Those of you who've read Bob Woodward's recent book Obama's Wars may have been impressed - as I was - by how hard President-elect Obama was struck by the top-secret assessments he received from the CIA.  Indeed, they would be sobering for anyone.  Yet, this was a candidate who made change, and a return to America's "true values," a rallying cry and centerpiece of his campaign.  Those "true" American values, we were raised to believe, included respect for human rights and, implicitly, a refusal to be complicit in violating them.  

Well, Guantanamo has yet to be closed, the Obama administration has used the cover of "national interests" to deny terror suspects the rights of due process of law - and now, in the pursuit of "national interests," is acceding to the use of child soldiers in some of the most conflicted and poverty-stricken countries on the planet.

Yes We Can?

WaPo: U.S. military campaign to topple resilient Taliban hasn't succeeded

After earlier reports touting the wonderful success US forces have had recently in smashing the Taliban (indeed, according to Carlotta Gall in the NYT, "routing the Taliban"), we're told by the Defense Dept today that the US has not succeeded in toppling the Taliban.  Obviously, not the news the public wanted to hear.  But, on the other hand, it certainly prepares us all for the announcement forthcoming from NATO early next month, at least according to Leslie Gelb, who's in a position to know: the departure date for "combat troops" will be 2014, much longer than the July 2011 start-to-withdraw date that Obama promised months ago.  As Gelb notes, this helps several people, on several scores: Karzai won't be facing his predecessor's fate of swinging from a lamp post quite so early, Obama won't need to deal with the accusation of "cutting and running" from "the terrorists" when (if?) he runs for re-election in 2012, and Petraeus gets the extension he's been angling for all along.

Of course, how all this gets funded with a probably new Republican-heavy Congress that will brook no tax increases - or cut in corporate profits for Raytheon, General Dynamics, or other weapons-industry Republican stalwarts - remains to be seen.

Those Frisky Kentucky Republicans

Courtesy of Salon, a story (with video) of how Rand Paul supporters wrestled a young woman demonstrator to the ground and then stomped on her head:

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Other Iraqi Documents in US's possession

From NPR's site comes this interesting revelation:

Saad Eskandar, head of the Iraq National Library and Archives, says he is trying to persuade the U.S. government to release another trove of documents. These detail atrocities during the Saddam Hussein era.

Eskandar says much of this database would be accessible to Iraqi academics and lawyers, but not to average people. He says while people have the right to know what happened to their relatives, how they might act on information from the Saddam data or the WikiLeaks data could be dangerous.

"If these records mention names of those who killed or the name of this battalion of this army units, or police, this will lead to social chaos, we don't want this," he says. 

As one Iraqi put it, "In our country, we don't sue someone when we feel like we've been wronged. We take revenge."

The US's Imperial Overstretch

Tony Karon's recent Time mag essay on the implications of Britain's decision to shrink its military is a must-read, if only because of his conclusion that a similar fate awaits the US down the road:

the message for the U.S. in Britain's contraction may be a lot more sobering than simply the retrenchment of military capability by its most trusted ally. Britain's case may have illustrated the iron law that fiscal deficits inevitably corrode a nation's ability to project power beyond its shores. . . .

The Pentagon maintains more than 800 bases beyond the 50 states, and stations close to 300,000 troops abroad. The 2009 U.S. defense budget of $660 billion was more than the combined defense expenditures of the next 17 countries on the spending table. And that budget continues to rise steadily, growing at 4.8% for 2010, a year in which the U.S. economy's GDP growth is likely to be less than 2%.

Militarily, the U.S. is the British Empire of the 21st century — and then some. But it is policing the world on the back of a colossal $1.5 trillion budget deficit and a staggering $13.5 trillion national debt. Its economy is in the grip of a deep, and possibly long-term, crisis that shows little sign of reducing an unemployment rate close to 10%, let alone being in a position to make the desperately needed investments in everything from education to infrastructure necessary to restore long-term competitiveness.

Karon also notes - and if only the rest of America were reading him - that the millions of voters clamoring for drastic spending cuts and tax cuts (including the Tea Party's wannabe patriots; I'm not convinced they understand the true meaning of that term) seem never to include the military in that demand.  Yet, as Karon again notes, "The Congressional Research Service calculated last September that the U.S. has spent $1.2 trillion on military operations since the 9/11 attacks, and the ongoing commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the U.S. more than $3 billion a week."

All of this puts me in mind of a then-celebrated (when it was published more than 20 years ago), but now curiously forgotten, book by the historian Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which traced the rise and decline of the West's great powers over the last 500 years.  He spotlighted precisely in that book what the US is swirling down toward right now: imperial overstretch that overreaches economic capacity and leads inexorably to decline and to eventually being superseded by a new rising power.  Of course, Tea Partiers and the more chauvinistic elements among both Republicans and Democrats - believers all in the gospel of American exceptionalism - would blow off Kennedy's thinking (and for that matter, Cassandras such as Andrew Bacevich) as old-school negativism, and even unpatriotic. 

More's the pity if such people get elected into office come early November.

Conflicting signals out of Afghanistan

As the date for Obama's December reassessment of the Afghan operation approaches, I can't help but be stunned by the conflicting reports about the situation there, and fearful about what it may portend.

Today, the NYT's Carlotta Gall has an almost breathlessly reported piece about how "coalition forces" are routing the Taliban in the ongoing Kandahar operation.  Gall reported earlier this week that this operation is a big test of the Afghan military's effectiveness in dealing with security threats.  Now, she asserts, the operation is meeting great success, due in no small part to an extremely effective "new" rocket system that, she reports, is accurate to within a meter, and that has forced many Taliban back over the border into Pakistan.  But, on the other hand, Derrick Crowe (who accuses Gall of being a war stenographer for the US military command in Afghanistan - and her report does indeed  rely heavily on US military spokesmen's statements) reminds us that this is the same rocket system that was used months ago in the Marja campaign, but had to be taken out of service after US Marines killed a bunch of civilians with it.  Who ya gonna believe?  At this point the jury is still out, but I have to remember that Petraeus wants to put news of success out there, to demoralize the Taliban, ratchet up good feelings about his operation - and his leadership of it, and, quite possibly, to help make the case for prolonging the US adventure there well beyond Obama's stated July 2011 date for starting a withdrawal.

All of this may provide some context for another development: Afghan president Hamid Karzai's decision to kick out of Afghanistan all private security contractors.  According to the CSM, their operations were seriously threatening the US military effort.  But the WaPo's Rajiv Chandrasekaran now reports that because of Karzai's decision, US-led reconstruction projects are closing down because their leader simply refuse to continue their operations without adequate security to protect them.

And that, in turn, undercuts the entire counter-insurgency strategy favored by Petraeus:

Programs to assist Afghan farmers and improve local government, which are vital to the overall U.S. effort to stabilize the volatile southern and eastern parts of the country, are among those that will be affected, the officials said.

The consequences of the ban on development firms employing private guards "will be catastrophic," said one U.S. official involved in the issue. "If these projects grind to a halt, we might as well go home. They are essential to the counterinsurgency strategy."

Another U.S. official said the ban would affect about $1.5 billion in ongoing reconstruction work. More than 20,000 Afghans will lose jobs in road-building and energy projects alone, the official said. . . .

The ban "also applies to private contractors who guard supply convoys for the military bearing food, fuel and other essential supplies, as well as to international banks and other private entities whose services support reconstruction work."

The Afghan government wants development workers and their projects to be guarded by police officers and soldiers, a goal that diplomats and aid workers say is unrealistic because the local government security forces are corrupt, ill-trained and not numerous enough to do the job. The development firms have also said they would be unable to insure their employees - a key prerequisite for operations in a war zone - if they are unable to employ private guards. . . .

Of particular concern to U.S. and NATO military officials is the effect of a shutdown on counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar province, where USAID's agriculture and governance programs are supposed to be implemented immediately after U.S. Army units clear areas of insurgents.

"This is the soft power that works hand in hand with the military's hard power," another development executive said. "You can't do counterinsurgency without these programs."

Something's gotta give.  


Meanwhile, the Financial Times notes the attention that Petraeus and the Pentagon are directing to a claimed uptick in contacts between the Karzai government and Taliban leaders - contacts that supposedly are evidence that the coalition's new tactics of pounding the be-jeezus out of the Taliban are working.  But the FT notes: 

. . . sceptics argue the US has an interest in publicising even the most tentative of contacts to provide a more optimistic narrative around the unpopular war ahead of a Nato summit next month and a White House review in December.  There is still little confidence in Kabul that the strands of secret negotiations and exploratory ­dialogue can coalesce into a peace process. . . .

There are also questions over how far a US offensive in Kandahar province, the Taliban’s spiritual birthplace, will succeed in convincing the Taliban that it must negotiate. In an indicator of the intensity of the fighting, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the number of patients admitted with gunshot or blast wounds to a hospital it supports in Kandahar has hit almost 1,000 in August and September compared with about 500 last year.

Reports from Kandahar suggest many fighters have retreated into havens in Pakistan. Even US officials have acknowledged that Mr Obama’s stated intention to start withdrawing US forces in July next year has led some Taliban hard-liners to believe they can outlast the west. Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador, dismissed the idea that Mr Omar would negotiate with the Afghan government as “comical”.

Prescription for Disaster: Zalmay Khalilzad on Pakistan

For a man whom the Bush administration touted as a star diplomat, Zalmay Khalilzad comes across (in his op-ed in today's NY Times) as not much better than a smack-em-down bully when it comes to the US and Pakistan. It's widely known that elements in the Pakistani military - especially the military intel branch known as ISI - have been sponsoring  the activities of some Afghan Taliban groups, and that those groups have found easy shelter in Pakistan.  ZK's solution?  Get tough:
The United States should demand that Pakistan shut down all sanctuaries and military support programs for insurgents or else we will carry out operations against those insurgent havens, with or without Pakistani consent. Arguments that such pressure would cause Pakistan to disintegrate are overstated. Pakistan’s institutions, particularly the country’s security organs, are sufficiently strong to preclude such an outcome.
Overstated? Really? Here's a country

• reeling in the aftermath of the most catastrophic floods in its history, with millions of poor villagers dislocated, struggling for food and shelter that their government has proved itself woefully unable to provide
• aflame with anger and suspicion toward the United States, which (in their view) dragged their country into a war more America's than Pakistan's and which is compounding that insult by ramping up drone attacks that kill dozens of Pakistani civilians
• saddled with a highly corruptible political leadership (led by Mr. Zardari, the infamous "Mr. Ten Percent") that represents the country's feudal elite vastly more than its urban and rural masses
• trying to overcome a legacy (promoted by the Mr. Bush for whom ZK worked) of dictatorship by the same "security organs" (i.e., the military) upon whom, he says, the US can rely to ensure Pakistan's stability if the US intervenes inside the country.

Meanwhile, says ZK, if Pakistan responds to such US intervention by closing the convoy routes on which the US military in Afghanistan so heavily relies, the US can abandon those routes and make more use of the northern routes as well as air transport.  Does he not realize that, even with the Pakistani routes open, the costs of supplying the US war in Afghanistan are almost prohibitively expensive, and that losing the Pakistan routes would increase that expense almost exponentially?

When does the bill for all of this come due?  On whose shoulders will it fall?  What is the man thinking?

The NY Times Editorial Board Instructs Iraq's Politicians

My goodness, it's so simple, according to the NYT editorial: Iraq's Shii politicians must make sure that Iraq's new government will be inclusive, with proper Sunni representation - and the Kurds must hold off on endorsing Nuri al-Maliki and use their "clout" to ensure the emergence of the afore-mentioned inclusive government.  Meanwhile, the US must press all sides to make a deal.

Is this the Rodney King school of editorializing?  As in, "Why can't we all just get along together?"

In a perfect world, peopled with love-filled, selfless, angelic beings, such an injunction might be all it would take.  But the Times does its readers a disservice by offering only the most succinct of hints about the long history of mistrust and violence that has created the fault lines within Iraqi society and politics.  At times throughout that history (including, ironically, the early years of the government dominated by the now much-reviled Baath party), those fault lines could be scabbed over.  But consistently during that history, it has also taken very little picking at that scab to reopen the wounds.

The NYT's stance here is one that I've seen consistently among my many provincially American students over the years: why can't those people just get along?  If Americans can do it (well, at least after 1865 - a date the significance of which deplorably few Americans, especially young ones, understand anymore), why can't everybody?

Nice sentiments, NYT.  But don't make it sound so simple.

Claims of Progress in Afghan War

I recommend Josh Partlow's report in the WaPo for the purposes of spin assessment.  Partlow's report reeks of cynicism about the US military's pronouncement of progress, especially with so much evidence to the contrary.  And as he notes, the Obama report card on the Afghan war is upcoming.  The Pentagon and field commanders are surely going to spin a case for their own success and effectiveness . . . and, ergo, increased funding.  I've selectively excerpted some portions below:

With a year-end report card coming due, top U.S. military and civilian officials in Afghanistan have begun to assert that they see concrete progress in the war against the Taliban, a sharp departure from earlier assessments that the insurgency had the momentum.

Despite growing numbers of Taliban attacks and American casualties, U.S. officials are building their case for why they are on the right track, ahead of the December war review ordered by President Obama. They describe an aggressive campaign that has killed or captured hundreds of Taliban leaders and more than 3,000 fighters around the country in recent months, and has pressured insurgents into exploring talks with the Afghan government. At the same time, they say, the Afghan army is bigger and better trained than it has ever been. . . .

As political pressure mounts for evidence that the United States and its allies are not hopelessly mired in Afghanistan, military officials here say the time is past to deplore deficiencies of manpower or strategy. Obama's 30,000 new troops are on the ground. The United States' most celebrated general is at the helm. And the deadline Obama set to begin withdrawal is nine months away.

Upbeat assessments had become more common here since Gen. David H. Petraeus took over in July, but the refrain grew louder after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sounded a note of hope during a trip to Afghanistan early last month.

Yet even as U.S. officials here echo Gates's assessment, they have offered relatively little evidence to back up their claims of progress, and many still hesitate to say that successes against the Taliban in certain pockets add up to the war's pendulum swinging their way. Indeed, one week last month broke the nine-year war's record for violence, as the Taliban sought to ambush parliamentary elections: NATO forces logged more than 1,600 attacks nationwide, 500 more than in the previous worst week.

Asked for specific instances of progress, NATO spokeswoman Maj. Sunset Belinsky cited Marja, the district in Kandahar where Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sent troops in January with the hopes of a quick victory that could build momentum for a broader push in the province. The Taliban proved resilient in Marja, and Afghan governance was slow to take hold, but Belinsky pointed out that the district now has 300 trained policemen where there were none five months ago, as well as four new schools, including a high school that reopened after more than six years.

[But as the AP reported less than 2 weeks ago, the Marines deployed in Marja are still facing a "full-blown insurgency."]

Skeptics here counter such examples with accounts of ineffectual counterinsurgency efforts. Official corruption remains pervasive, and there is little tangible evidence of improved governance on a national scale, one of the main reasons the Taliban has won support. Relations between the United States and President Hamid Karzai's government are still fraught. Karzai's aides voice frustration with U.S. unwillingness to confront Pakistan more firmly on harboring insurgents. They have also repeatedly urged Petraeus to eliminate night raids and work to further reduce civilian casualties.

"This uncertainty, confusion and distrust is getting stronger and stronger now," said Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Afghanistan's deputy national security adviser. "The basic thing we should fix is to reestablish the trust."

U.S. military officials who say they see progress in the war also praise the development of the Afghan security forces, particularly the army, which has already surpassed its target of 134,000 members by the end of this month. In Kandahar, Afghan troops outnumber NATO forces for the first time, according to Wardak, the defense minister.

"We are practically in the lead of the operation," he said.

And see my post earlier today -  new operation unfolding there, with Afghan troops in the lead.  We'll see . . .

Big Test for Afghan Military?

The NY Times reports on a new military operation in the Kandahar region, the Taliban heartland, in which Afghan forces are said to be playing a major role.

This bears watching, especially after the reported failures of Afghan forces during an operation a few months ago, as well as the ongoing reports of fraud, corruption, and drug abuse in their ranks.  Add to that the fact that the Afghan army is dominated by Tajik and other non-Pashtun ethnic groups, and that they're being asked to (1) take on predominantly Pashtun fighters (2) in predominantly Pashtun communities, and that many commentators have noted that in going after the Taliban, the US has in fact inserted itself into an Afghani ethnic-based civil war . . .  one may conclude that the consequences of success or failure here may be significant.

And the timing is significant as well.  The mid-term elections are upon us.  The Democrats are evidently set to suffer substantial losses in both houses of Congress, but some signal of success for Obama's Afghan policy might mitigate some of those losses, even swing some crucial votes toward Democratic candidates (although the war in Afghanistan does indeed seem to be off most voters' radar).  Any success for Obama's policy is predicated upon ramping up an Afghan army that will be effective enough to enable the US to begin to pull its own forces out of there.

So much so, in fact, that I'd be careful to watch and see how much the reports of this operation will be spun to promote the "we're winning" trope.