The Dreyfuss Report

Afghan Apocalypse, Part II

By Robert Dreyfuss

This is the second of two accounts of thinktank evaluations of the war in Afghanistan. The first was a report from the Brookings Institution on Tuesday. Today, the Heritage Foundation.

The highlight of Thursday's event at the Heritage Foundation was analyst Marvin Weinbaum's scathing review of the Afghan elections. Weinbaum, who served as a member of Barack Obama's advisory task force on Afghanistan, is a former analyst for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). His report on the election, where he served as an observer during the vote, contrasted sharply with the happy talk from the administration and from official and semi-official Afghan agencies who presented the vote as an inspiring exercise in democracy.

It wasn't.

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August 27, 2009

Afghanistan Apocalypse

By Robert Dreyfuss

Yesterday afternoon at the Brookings Institution, four analysts portrayed a bleak and terrifying vision of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan in the wake of the presidential election. All four were hawkish, reflecting a growing consensus in the Washington establishment that the Afghanistan war is only just beginning.

Their conclusions: (1) A significant escalation of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won't be possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until five years have passed.

The experts at the panel were Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and adviser to four presidents, who chaired President Obama's Afghan task force; Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert and adviser to General David Petraeus; Tony Cordesman, a conservative military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Kim Kagan, head of the Institute for the Study of War.

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August 26, 2009

'Iraq Will Be A Colony of Iran'

By Robert Dreyfuss

Iraq's Shiite religious parties, most with ties to Iran, have reestablished a political bloc called the Iraqi National Alliance. Among its founders are Ahmad Chalabi, the revered darling of US neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute; Muqtada al-Sadr, the brooding, mercurial mullah who has mysteriously retreated to Qom, Iran's religious capital, for quick-study lessons on how to become an ayatollah; and, of course, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, one of the founders of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which has changed its name but not its spots. SCIRI, the anchor of the new coalition, is now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), but it still acts as an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which founded it in 1982, and its paramilitary Badr Brigade -- also a part of the new Iraqi alliance -- is a terrorist unit that operates pro-Iran death squads in Iraq.

Let's sort this out.

First of all, although Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has so far opted not to join the pan-Shiite religious alliance, American Pollyannas who see Maliki as a nationalist, pro-American ally are wrong. Like the new INA alliance, Maliki is in thrall to the Iranians, too, only slightly less so. His secretive, cult-like Dawa Party -- which has split and split again -- provides nearly all of his inner-circle allies and advisers, and according to Iraqi sources Maliki is heavily vested in ties to Iran and its intelligence services. He shrewdly, though unconvincingly, positioned himself and his new party, State of Law, as a pro-unity, nationalist party during the January provincial elections, but although Maliki tried to find allies among secular Iraqis, religious Sunnis, and Kurds, nearly all of his votes came from Arab Shiites. He got votes from Iraqis who were unhappy with their country's religious-right drift and who rejected ISCI and its allies, in part by lavishing patronage to newly created tribal councils in the Shiite-majority provinces. As a result, Maliki has been riding high of late, and a well-placed former Iraqi official told me that Maliki felt strong enough to tell the founders of the Iraqi National Alliance that he'd refuse to join unless they let him run the show, with a guarantee that he'd be reelected as prime minister if the Alliance wins a majority in the January, 2010, election. Maliki may or may not have overestimated his strength, but in any case he may decide to join the Alliance at a later date -- or, alternately, he might join them after the election in a coalition government. In either case, Iran will be the big winner, especially as US forces move out.

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August 25, 2009

Washington Post Flops

By Robert Dreyfuss

This is a media rant. I'm not one of those people who are constantly berating the media (the so-called "mainstream media") for their failings. However, for quite a while I've been watching the spiraling downward of the Washington Post coverage of international affairs. But today they hit a new low.

The Saturday, August 22, edition of the Post contains not a single article -- count 'em, zero -- on anything relating to the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, or the ongoing crisis in Iran.

By way of contrast, the New York Times carried a page one piece on the aftermath of the election in Afghanistan, a lead piece in its international section on the Iranian crisis, focusing on President Ahmadinejad's problems in assembling a Cabinet for his second term, and a lengthy piece sorting out the pieces left over from the enormous bombings that devastated downtown Baghdad on Wednesday.

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August 22, 2009

Fixing Afghanistan

By Robert Dreyfuss

Some thoughts on Afghanistan, now that the election's come and gone.

I don't usually find inspiration in the pages of the Washington Times, are rarely if ever in the writings of Tony Blankley, the former spokesman for Newt Gingrich, but his recent column on the mess in Afghanistan struck me as intelligent and provocative. It's called "Empower the local tribal chiefs," and it makes sense to me. Blankley says that the United States is fast making enemies in Afghanistan of the very tribesmen who expelled the USSR, and he makes this essential point about the faulty thinking behind US strategy there:

"It would appear that a policy that calls for substantially increased troop strength for both the American and Afghan forces implies a policy that aspires to build a strong central government in Kabul capable of permanently suppressing the Taliban. But the long history of Afghanistan suggests that, unlike Iraq (or Japan and Germany after World War II), Afghanistan is not likely to accept a strong central government."

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August 21, 2009

Iraq Explodes

By Robert Dreyfuss

The news from the war capitals isn't good. In Kabul, the Taliban is carrying out attacks at the very center of Afghanistan's capital, rocketing the grounds of the presidential palace, launching suicide bombs at Kabul convoys, and last week setting off huge bombs on the heavily guarded road between the US embassy and the presidential palace.

But today I'm focusing on Iraq, where today bombers set off near-simultaneous truck bombs that devasted the Iraqi foreign ministry and finance ministry, killing 100 people and injuring at least 600, on opposite sides of the Tigris River. The entire heart of the Iraqi capital is in shock. At the foreign ministry, an official told the New York Times, "The whole ministry is destroyed."

It's probably the most significant bombings in Baghdad since the attacks on the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations offices in 2003.

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August 19, 2009

Karzai, the Pashtuns, and the Taliban

By Robert Dreyfuss

The prospects for Afghanistan's election on Thursday are murky, at best.

The Taliban are threatening to disrupt the vote in areas south and east of Kabul, where they are strong, and say that they will take reprisals against anyone who votes. "Afghans must boycott the deceitful American project and head for the trenches of holy war," said a communique from the Taliban. The Taliban, which is overwhelmingly Pashtun, is apparently counting on its ability to persuade or intimidate Pashtuns to stay away from the polls, which could doom or weaken Karzai. An excellent analysis in the New York Times by Dexter Filkins notes that the Pashtun vote is critical to Karzai's chances on Thursday:

"Five years ago, Mr. Karzai rode to an election victory on a wave of support from his fellow Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan's population."

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August 17, 2009

State Department: "Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!"

By Robert Dreyfuss

President Obama, along with his adviser on counterterrorism, John Brennan, a White House deputy national security adviser, have tried to reorient US policy away from the nonsensical idea of a Global War on Terror. So far, so good.

But then something like this.

Below are some excerpts from a ludicrous, alarmist, and absolutely useless "worldwide caution" published last month by the State Department. It's too long to include the whole thing, but I've attached here some representative excerpts that show how the State Department shamelessly uses non-specific scare tactics to worry Americans about the threat of terrorism overseas.

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August 14, 2009

The Thirty Years' War

By Robert Dreyfuss

With great anticipation, I trucked over to the posh St. Regis Hotel, just north of the White House, to see Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his team at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress. I shouldn't have bothered.

The weird thing about the event is that in the room were literally hundreds of the Washington foreign policy elite, current and former officials, people with lots of experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and, of course, journalists, too. And Holbrooke brought with him literally his entire team, minus a few who couldn't be there: top regional experts such as Barnett Rubin and Vali Nasr, and about a dozen other members of Holbrooke's Af-Pak task force. But the session was boring, pedestrian, and so mind-numbingly simplistic that it seemed like Holbooke and Co. were talking to third graders.

And their goal was to convince us that the "civilians" involved in the Thirty Years' War in Afghanistan can rebuild that shattered nation from the ground up. They didn't convince me.

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August 12, 2009

White House Opening to Hezbollah, Hamas?

By Robert Dreyfuss

Last week, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, John Brennan, the White House's top adviser on terrorism, described the outlines of the Obama administration's new counterterrorism strategy. During his appearance, which drew several hundred people to the basement conference room at CSIS, I had a chance to ask Brennan about US policy toward Hezbollah and Hamas. In his response, Brennan opened the door a crack to the idea of a new US policy toward the two groups, and his comments stirred some unhappiness at the State Department. Here's are two transcripts, first, my exchange with Brennan and then the question-and-answer session at the State Department:

Q. Good morning, John. I'm Bob Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine. ... In between al-Qaida and general violent extremists, there are other organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, even the Taliban, that seem amenable to the kind of persuasion that you said that al-Qaida, the president believes, is not amenable to.

And we've discussed this in the past, and you've suggested that it might be possible to have a dialogue with Hamas and Hezbollah, and I think the president himself has said the Taliban. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about disaggregating these movements, which the Bush administration was so prone to rolling up into one, big Islamo-fascist ball of wax. Talk a little bit about how we could deal with some of the other formations that exist and whether or not it might be prudent to start talking to them, now.

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August 10, 2009