That there is a conflict existing between the Jewish state of Israel and its neighbors is a known fact throughout the world. From there, however, explaining the conflict further and exploring its roots requires a certain amount of nuance. Most casual observers may equate the conflict over religious differences between two monotheistic faiths or even a dispute over real estate. In large part they would be right. However, there is something more profound just under the surface. What fuels this incredible conflict is something far more tangible than religious disputes and closed borders. What gives the region the awesome force of power to take up arms for their cause generation after generation comes from the concept of ethnonationalism.

Ethnonationalism, or ethnic nationalism, may sound like the latest academic buzzword; but, in fact, ethnonationalism is hardly a new concept. It has been around since humans first developed the sense of kinship, language, tribalism, tradition, religion, cosmopolitans, nation states and so forth. It produces the sources for human spirit and enmity. Ethnonatioalism brought forth Manifest Destiny, the U.S. Civil War, WWI and WWII (which was fueled by extreme ethnonationalism in National Socialism ideology) and centuries long continental and world dominance by the nation states of Europe. The list could literally go on and on. It’s based off a narrow list of identities that fuels the societal belief behind a particular cause. It’s often strong, unwilling to compromise, and lasting. Those in the modern era that may find such an archaic premise troubling, intellectually and morally, haven’t paid attention to how the world has been shaped by ethnonationalism. Take America, our modern thinking polity often times belittles the ideas of ethnic nationalism or a particular national identity. We often pride ourselves as an “open” society where numerous ethnicities live in relative peace.

Social scientist go to great lengths to explain the enduring qualities of a culture, usually described as Western, that is inviting making it easier for different nationalities regardless of racial or religious origins to assimilate. They label this as liberal or civic nationalism. However, the fact that ethnonationalism already won out in North America over a century ago and continues to shape the identity of this country is rarely considered. Jerry Z. Muller (2008) says in his Foreign Affairs article, Us and Them, “The liberal view has competed with and often lost out to a different view, that of ethnonationalism. The core of ethnonatioinalist idea is that nations are defined by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry.” (p. 20) Over the course of a couple of centuries, migration by a disproportionate amount of white Protestants from Northern-Europe and England brought with them a culture, traditions, laws and language. They, and their subsequent ancestors (that even include us), tamed, created and shaped the U.S. and as a result, the competition between civilizations in North America has been over for nearly 200 years.

Through conquest and industry, ethnonationalism in America reigned supreme and it has been by those standards that others have assimilated and adopted. If the societal equilibrium were to shift away from this because of mass migration or, a separate demographic explosion, it’s not all that unlikely that competing cultures here in the U.S. could rekindle the flames of ethnonationalism.

Ethnonationalism is a strong force in Arab nations. Mainly because of their history, good and bad, and their religion. The modern Arab nationalist/extremist suffers from insecurities, and an inferiority complex. Added to that is a long laundry list of grievances and jealousies suffered by the West. While their history involves Defensive Developmentalism, government incompetence and loose and feuding confederations of tribes, all in which brought on a steady decline of social, military and political capital. Their nemesis in the West represents the antithesis to their situation. Europe’s high sense of identity and righteousness led to a global pursuit of riches, conquest, glory and dominance at the expense of the Middle East. When that episode in their history ran its course, American dominance picked up where Europe left off.

But to get to the point that allowed Western-European dominance and manipulation in the Middle East something binding and energetic was needed in the region. It came in the form of strong nation-states that were emerging in Western Europe. The competition between the competing powers in Europe during the 1500s – 1800s laid the way for increased economic and military expansion. Economic prosperity and ethnic nationalism requires literacy and education to promote communication and common beliefs. What developed from this was set of competing nation states that were very defined, educated and ethically charged, and the results were explosive. Consequently, the Middle East endured centuries of economic and political incursion through colonization by a Western civilization that far outpaced them in almost all aspects of life, and continues even today. Nothing in the daily lives of Arabs pass without a Western imprint on it. From music, to movies, commercial goods and technologies, all are a product of Western civilization. For many Arabs that even means the very country they live in was created or influenced by Western powers.

These are all things that most Arabs are aware of and resent. This, of course, plays heavily on their physic. And herein lies the reason for conflicts, ethnonationalism and the clash between West and Middle-east vs. Israel.If ethnonationalism gives reason to fight along borders or within a region, then hatred, distrust, jealousy and indifference with the Christian West give Arab-Muslims an overarching global cause.Samuel P. Huntington (1996) refers to this movement in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (p. 255). It is the overriding force in today’s global politics and particularly in the Middle East. All observable differences have to be considered and accepted as major contributors to the conflict such as different language, religion, culture, etc. However, Western dominance and Diktat runs an equally strong course through the life of the Arab world. In the view of most Arab-Muslim nationalist, Israel’s existence in former Palestine offers a daily reminder of Western dominance and the inadequacies of the Arab world. Jewish Israel is a spur literally in the side of Islam.

Considering Israel’s size and population great wealth, technology, and medical advances provide a standard of living that far exceeds most Arab countries.What’s more, it is the region’s premier military power and has been tested numerous times, in which resulted in embarrassing and disastrous defeats for Arab-Muslim nations. It’s no wonder that the creation and existence of Israel is first on the list of grievances.

Balfour Agreement, Zionism and Hezbollah

The ending of WWI brought the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with it a great vacuum to fill. The British Empire still had important interest in the region. Palestine stood out strategically because it served as a land bridge from Egypt to India and offered security to the Suez Canal protecting the sea road to India and elsewhere throughout the Empire. Britain, under Lloyd George devised away to bring Palestine under its sphere and serve as an ally in the Mid East. He distrusted the Arabs in Palestine and possible German interference in the region; therefore, pushed the idea of mass Jewish resettlement in the ancient land. David Fromkin (1989) in his book A Peace to End All Peace supports the idea. “There were also those who were worried about allowing the Germans and Turks to retain control of an area whose vital importance had been underscored by the Prime Minister. The assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet , Leo Amery and Mark Sykes, worried that in the postwar world the Ottoman Empire might fall completely in the clutches of Germany. Were that to happen, the road to India would be in enemy hands – a threat the British Empire could avert only by ejecting the Turks and Germans, and taking into British hands the southern perimeter of the Ottoman domains.” (p. 276)

These factors plus Biblical romanticism, Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded and heavy-handed international views, and a growing surge of Zionism led to the Balfour agreement the prelude to the British mandate that created modern day Israel.Zionism was growing in importance in Europe as well as in America. It was fueled from Jewish suffering and centuries of persecution in just about whatever land they settled. Before the end of WWI, they began to be gripped by the idea returning to their ancestral homeland in Palestine as the “Land of Israel”. The idea that they could set up a Jewish government based on self-determination and structured on Western democracy, led to a nostalgic frenzy. Backed by the British government, fear of anti-Semitism and, later the holocaust, migration was encouraged to create a modern Jewish state.

With them they brought valuable trades in medicine, law, education, commerce and a Western sense of culture that previously was absent from the area. All of this was promptly greeted with a revolt from the indigenous Arabs of the region. The areas under control by Arabs were cleansed of Jews and the areas controlled by Jews forced Arabs out to the surrounding Arab countries. During the ensuing years, violence against Jews in Arab countries forced another round of migration to Israel. Jerry Muller (2008) writes about the impact in the region upon the establishment of the Jewish state and Jewish migration. “Some 750,000 Arabs left, primarily for the surrounding Arab countries, andthe remaining 150,000 constituted only about a sixth of the population of thenew Jewish State. In the years afterward, nationalist-inspired violence against Jews in Arab countries propelled almost all of the more than 500,000 Jews there to leave their lands of origin and immigrate to Israel.” (p. 29)

The seeds for ethnonationlsim and true clash between West and Islam were being planted.Hezbollah is a byproduct from the creation of the Jewish sate and Zionism. Though founded only in 1982 out of reaction from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the group itself is hardly a new concept. Its history goes back as far as Arab-Muslim nationalism/Islamism does and can be seen as a microcosm of Arab/Islamic sentiment towards Israel and Western backing. The force itself acts as troops in the trench on the front line fighting against Western incursion and Zionism. Also, it gives an outlet for uneducated and unemployed young men to serve a cause greater than their lowly existence can muster. Furthermore, Hezbollah gives the Muslim world a chance to cheer and feel a source of pride as it repeatedly thumbs its nose at Israel and, by extension, engages in a proxy war with the West. Naturally, they receive high popularity in Southern Lebanon and support from regional powers like Syria and Iran.

Ethnonationalism, and all the defining and clashing identities that come with it contributed to the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict in 2006. However, something much greater and far reaching was at play.What actually is taking place is the Islamic world’s attempt to do away with the status-quo of Western interference in the region. Israel represents Western dominance and arrogance; therefore, the conflict is one entirely between the West and Islam, with Israel as the battlefront. The West, and America being its standard bearer, represents an image of unimaginable power and wealth — with God like powers that is able to topple governments as well as prop them up. With that comes an arrogance and a global swagger coupled with high minded policies of inclusion, tolerance and the persuasion of Western universal values and systems. While promoting these ideals, the West (mainly the U.S.) sometimes bomb and invade Muslim countries while at the same time preaching restraint, praising human rights, and acting as a global hawk for weapons proliferation. This creates resentment and assertiveness from the Muslim world and sets the path for extremism. The populace adopts an antagonistic attitude and governments begin to cooperate to undermine American-Western aims, as was the case with the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

History is always present and the events of the past leaves the residual necessary to fuel the ongoing pattern of conflict between the West and Islam. There is a source of pride and romanticism that exist in the Muslim world. Muslim dominance was absolute in the Middle East and North Africa by the 8th century. The Arabic armies fought off Christian advances into the Holy Land and by the 13th century the Ottomans were a “world” power that caused Europe to quake. This era was the high-water mark of Muslim dominance and exertion in worldly affairs. From the 16th century on the West, powered by organized nation-states, gained every conceivable advantage over the Ottomans and other Empires in the Middle East.

By the 20th century almost the entire Middle East was under the sphere of Western control. Huntington (1996) writes, “By 1920 only four Muslim countries – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan – remained independent of some form of non-Muslim rule.”(p. 210). Considering all of this, that groups like Hezbollah draws support is hardly amazing. These Islamic groups play up Islamic romanticism and fuel the imagination of a time when Islam and its principles ran supreme. It glorifies an explosive culture, a growing population and draws out on the fundamental differences that exist between Christianity and Islam especially in a time when the American-Western way of life is so heavily promoted and seductive to Middle Eastern culture. It gives a growing population of youth a chance to be a part of a grand cause and an opportunity to advance socially.

More importantly, Islam has showed a propensity for violence and absolutism and with the Western creation of Jewish Israel sitting squarely and defiantly on their land only brings the volatile culture to a boil. Samuel Huntington (1996) states, “Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local Muslim and non-Muslim peoples.” And again he states supported by a list of evidence. “In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilazational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims” (pp. 256, 257, 258).

Conclusion

The ideological, cultural, religious and deeply historical differences between the Islamic/fundamentalist Middle East and the Christian/secular West are likely to continue. A growing younger Muslim population who tend to be more conservative and are likely to be more fundamental will only add to an assertive culture with an absolutist faith. Larger numbers of immigrants from the Middle East to Europe and America will further create antagonisms between the cultures as tensions and conflicts take place elsewhere. Islamic states like Iran who is showing the willingness to assert their power regionally may also prove to be a destabilizing influence.

Israel was created during an age of ethnonationalism and many of its citizens and leaders are still influenced by it. The country and its government was born from 20th century style of European nationalism and still carries with it the policies and sentiment that helped to shape it. Therefore, it is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, that Israeli will make any substantial concessions to Muslim demands. As the regional military power, backed by the U.S., Israel will continue to defend itself from threats and protect its interest in the region.

If the Middle East can become stabilized economically during this century, many of the disenchanted youth can find opportunity socially and through education, and not through radical Islamic groups. As opportunities increase and standard of living goes up so will the fortunes of the region. However, radicalism and resentment seems to be the only social/political outlet and current source for Arab-Muslim thinking.

References and Bibliography

Ferguson, N. (2006). The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Books.

Fromkin, D. (1989).A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Avon Books

Huntington, S. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & amp; and; Schuster.

Muller, J. (2008). The Clash of Peoples: Us and Them. Foreign Affairs, 87 (2) , 18-35.

Robin Williams and Robert De Niro in the 1990 film, Awakenings.

In the 1990 film, Awakenings, neurologist Dr. Malcolm Sayer (played by Robin Williams) discovers what at first appears to be a miracle cure in the drug L-DOPA. L-DOPA “awakens” patients of a sleeping sickness rendered comatose for decades. Suddenly, these men and women who were thought to be little more than vegetables were thrust into life once more.

There is a moment, a brief glimpse of hope in this film, as the patients experience life once again. It is as though all is well. The drug works miraculously. And then it starts to slip. Leanord Lowe, played by Robert De Niro, is the focus of the story. He transforms slowly from fully “awakened” into an increasingly disfunctional state. This physical withdrawal is accompanied by a descent into rage, hopelessness, and in the end, resignation. One by one the patients are taken off the drug, and slip once again into a perpetual sleep.

The Awakening Councils

Sheik Abdul al-Rishawi, the founder of the Awakening Councils, was assassinated in September 2007.

In 2005 the sheiks of al Anbar Province in Iraq began what has since been termed the Anbar Awakening. Sheik Abdul al-Rishawi formed the Anbar Awakening Council, the first and most prominent in a series of Sunni tribal coalitions whose aim was to ally themselves to the United States forces in an attempt to kill or force al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq out of that country. This alliance was born from the ashes of both a failed US strategy and the overly aggressive tactics of al Qaeda in Iraq. Essentially, the sheiks had become fed up with their guests, who ended up killing far fewer Americans than Iraqis.

Indeed, Abdul al-Rishawi was assassinated two years later, though his cause and the cause of all the Awakening movements continued beyond his death.

These Awakenings were largely funded by the US Government, and coincided to some extent with three important events in Iraq. The first was the promotion of General David Petraeus to the top job in Iraq, and the Army’s subsequent adoption of a modern counter-insurgency strategy there. The second was the surge in troops authorized by Washington.

The third event is less measurable, and coincided directly with the rise of both Sunni and Shiite militias. What has happened over the past few years has been the voluntary ethnic relocation of Iraqis into their own ethno-religious regions. Sunnis have migrated into Sunni areas, Shiites into their own neighborhoods. Tension remains, but the visceral, daily contact between subgroups has diminished. It is reminiscent of Jerusalem before and after the 1948 war, as Jews and Arabs began to sequester themselves off from one another. Peacefulness ensued, if not peace.

It is likely that the Awakenings along with the continous ethnic relocation during that period warrant greater credit for rising security in Iraq than American efforts such as the Surge, though it could also be argued that they never have worked so well had the US not adopted the Petraeus counter-insurgency approach. Essentially there was a great meeting of minds and will that led to what can now be described as a delicate stability in Iraq, a tenous calm. Indeed, US forces can safely say that they are at least on the road to victory (in some sense) in the country that only a year ago seemed a doomed quagmire, expensive and futile and foolhardy.

Now we have a glimpse of what stability may look like in Iraq. The government there has flexed its muscle at least a little, clamping down on Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army with US assistance, and asserting itself as more than just a US puppet. Iraqi Security forces are better trained and equipped, and more importantly, more confident than at any point during the US occupation.

Perpetual Sleep

They are so confident, in fact, that the predominantly Shiite Iraqi Government has proposed disbanding the Sunni Awakening councils altogether, and though they promise to incorporate up to a quarter of the members into regular Iraqi Security forces, that leaves a potential 75,000 armed, trained militia fighters out of a job. When Dr. Sayer’s patients found themselves suddenly losing their newfound power they experienced hopelessness and rage. If this Awakening should falter, or be actively suppressed, I wonder what sort of rage might be felt on the streets of Baghdad, and through al Anbar and beyond?

Already the Iraqi Government has begun to crack down on the Awakening councils, arresting some members, and attempting to disarm or disenfranchise others. One might see this as a natural progression from militia-rule to centralized Government. Another might see this as sectarian politics, with the Shiite majority doing its best to hold on to as much power as possible.

The US is now planning a drawdown of troops. This is a good thing. While there is no possibility of withdrawing completely from Iraq in the near or even distant future, it has become apparent that the Iraqi Government can do more on its own behalf. Whether the choices it makes will be wise is another question, but it is without a doubt beyond American control. We wisely paid the salaries of thousands of Sunni fighters, and thy drove out al Qaeda. If the Iraqi Government will not do the same, what can the United States do to stop them?

The Surge made the counter-insurgency possible. The vision of General Petraeus coincided perfectly with the brave and sensible actions of the Sunni tribes. Security is possible. We can see it on the horizon, and behind it somewhere well out of sight is that elusive peace we once believed unattainable.

But is it all an illusion? Has this all been little more than the effects of a miracle drug soon to wear off, leaving the country in the same sad state it was in two or three years ago? The threat of civil war still looms like a black cloud above everything, far more visible, more tangible than that will o’ the wisp, peace.

~cross-posted at Newsvine.  Join the Discussion!

Time and again, the United Nations, rather than disavowing, condemning, or defeating genocide, has embraced those very countries that happen to be its worst perpetrators.

One of McCain’s best ideas this election season has been the creation of a League of Democracies.

I am not opposed to Wilsonian Multilateralism (or Clintonian for that matter). However, I do disagree with any nation’s foolish reliance on a corrupt organization that protects genocide while denouncing fledgling democracies. The hypocrisy is staggering.

I’m also in favor of regime change when possible and necessary, and with humanitarian intervention when the stakes are high enough. I do believe government’s such as Sudan under Omar Bashir should be toppled for the greater good. Does this mean we need to invest years and billions of dollars in future nation building as we are now in Iraq? It’s hard to say. Certainly international, bi-partisan cooperation could help hasten efforts in places such as Darfur where the question of saving human life is far more urgent than any question of re-building. This does not, however, mean that we should enter countries without international support or proper planning. The first three years in Iraq should be enough of a precautionary tale. The UN, however, is not an international body willing to act in any cohesive or meaningful way.

Could we blend some version of practical multilateralism with the Bush Doctrine? It seems less and less likely that either way is plausible without some help from the other.

An American Century?

America is in the unique position of leadership under such a multilateral foreign policy. McCain’s League of Democracies may be an ideal vehicle for this hybrid of American power and international cooperation. It is my hope that even if McCain loses–and I believe he will lose at this point–that Barack Obama and McCain put their differences aside to work toward achieving this foreign policy. Bi-partisanship will be necessary in the coming years.

The Bush administration entered the White House intent upon a far less interventionist policy than the Clinton administration–indeed, Bush came across far less hawkish than Gore in the 2000 election, disavowing regime change and nation building. However, the events of 9/11, the fear of WMD’s in Iraq, and the overall growing international tension forced the Bush administration into a foreign policy that they did not initially plan. Indeed, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives used this to their advantage, but Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others were more of the Realist variety, reluctant to fully embrace the hawkish policies that the neocons advocated.

This combination of neoconservative unilateralism and more classically conservative distrust of international powers and institutions led to a United States foreign policy that was anything but multilateralist, and oftentimes unsure of the direction it wanted to move. This goes deeper than the obvious disagreements between a Powell State Department and the more hawkish DOD. Indeed, even during the Rice years, State has been more moderate in its approach to foreign affairs.

The “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq was, and is, a farce save for Britain. This is not to diminish the bravery of the token troops sent from Poland, Italy, Georgia and the other Coalition nations, but in all seriousness, should America withdraw, these troops would be utterly useless. Even the NATO operation in Afghanistan has been rather more a unilateralist approach than it ought to be, with only the Danish and the British contributing much of anything at all to the effort.

Globalization and Multilateralism

It is my hope that whoever becomes President will continue to push a strong foreign policy agenda, especially against the rogue nations Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea (not to mention Russia, China…the list goes on). I also hope that they eschew the narrow unilateralism of the Bush years in favor of a more practical multilateralist approach.

This will take very rigorous diplomacy on America’s part, especially since America has reached new lows of unpopularity and mistrust around the world. Ironically, this has occurred simultaneously with the election of some of the most pro-US European leaders to take office in years. It is a promising, ironic, and dangerous world we entrust to the next American President.

Our allies can live up to that title more in the coming years, as can America, and we can do more to convince other democracies that this war against radicalism, proliferation of nuclear arms, and terror is one that we all must face together. It is a struggle that we cannot face alone, and that our allies cannot wish away. America should lead, but it should not leave behind the rest of the free world. Globalization has changed the game. In a world in which economies are inextricably bound to one another, the question can never only be one of national security–it is international security that must be achieved.

If the United Nations cannot bring this about, effectively abandoning its mission, and choses instead to cater to the tyrants and demagogues rather than uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, then America must find a new way to shore up its international support. We cannot go it alone for another eight years, nor can we fall victim to the easy road of moral relativity, tolerating the dangerously intolerant.

The time has come to throw out both options: futile international efforts and cowboy politics, and to seek out new ways to create a safer, more peaceful world, whoever our next President may be.

~cross-posted at <a href=”http://neoconstant.newsvine.com/_news/2008/10/16/2008268-multilateralism-and-the-bush-doctrine”>Newsvine.</a>

This is a bit old, as far as news goes, but I thought it was still relevant:

(more…)

Daniel Pipes writes in the Washington Times:

The list of “unwinnable wars” goes on and includes, for example, the counterinsurgencies in Sri Lanka and Nepal. “Underlying all these analyses,” notes Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli major general, is the assumption “that counterinsurgency campaigns necessarily turn into protracted conflicts that will inevitably lose political support.”

Gen. Amidror, however, disagrees with this assessment. In a recent study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “Winning Counterinsurgency War: The Israeli Experience,” he convincingly argues that states can beat nonstate actors.

This debate has the greatest significance, for if the pessimists are right, Western powers are doomed to lose every current and future conflict not involving conventional forces (meaning planes, ships and tanks). The future would look bleak, with the prospect of successful insurgencies around the world and even within the West itself. One can only shudder at the prospect of an Israeli-style intifada in, say, the United States. Coincidentally, news came from Australia last week of an Islamist group calling for a “forest jihad” of massive fires in that country.

Iraq may well prove this article’s case. Israel, on the other hand, seems unable or unwilling to do what it has to do in order to get to the stage of “dull war.”

They will not make the hard decisions–to isolate the terrorists mainly, and to cut their funds and supplies off–and instead pander to world opinion with yet another land-for-peace agreement. History has shown us the viability of such “deals.”

Land for peace may someday be an option. It may someday work. But not until the terrorist/insurgent element is crippled utterly. Israel cannot continue to treat the symptom. They must address the root cause.

Critics might argue that terror is a symptom, that the root cause is deeper. This may be true on one level. However, I would argue that the insurgency has taken on a life (or a disease?) of its own. To even get to the layer beneath it, the “root-root cause”, all terror must end, and to do that, I think these counter-insurgency efforts must be made.

If it can work in oil-rich, multi-ethnic, mad-house Iraq, in can work in Gaza and the West Bank.

Interesting analysis of the early days of the surge and the movement to get behind Patreaus:

Retired Army Gen. Jack Keane came to the White House on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, to deliver a strong and sober message. The military chain of command, he told Vice President Cheney, wasn’t on the same page as the current U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The tension threatened to undermine Petraeus’s chances of continued success, Keane said.

Keane, a former vice chief of the Army, was 63, 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, with a boxer’s face framed by tightly cropped hair. As far as Cheney was concerned, Keane was outstanding — an experienced soldier who had maintained great Pentagon contacts, had no ax to grind and had been a mentor to Petraeus. Keane was all meat and potatoes; he didn’t inflate expectations or waste Cheney’s time.

By the late summer of 2007, Keane had established an unusual back-channel relationship with the president and vice president, a kind of shadow general advising them on the Iraq war. This September visit was the fifth back-channel briefing that Keane had given the vice president that year.

~read the rest at the Washington Post

Well, the US is stepping down as the Iraqi’s stand up.

The plan for the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to take over Iraq security is directly linked to the US plan to draw down forces and as briefed by General Petraeus in September 2007. For military planners, there are natural decision points for when to reduce forces based on the rotation schedule of US forces. These semi-annual decision points are September for drawdowns to be completed by January, and March for drawdowns to be completed by July. The drawdown schedule is not a hard and fast schedule. At each of these points the option to delay exists if the situation on the ground warrants it.

This Long War Journal article details plans for withdrawal, which should be good news to anyone involved.
Also read Michael Totten over at Commentary, describing the “perilous peace.”

Associated Press Baghdad Bureau Chief Robert Reid and his chief military reporter Robert Burns published a dispatch from Iraq over the weekend that should have made banner headlines. “It’s not the end of fighting,” they wrote. “It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.” This is exactly right, but millions of Americans still have no idea. Coverage from Iraq has diminished as much as the casualty rates since General David Petraeus implemented an effective counterinsurgency strategy in early 2007. At least we’re finally seeing a media consensus emerge after a year and a half of looking at the data as though it were inkblots on a Rorschach. It’s nearly impossible to work in Iraq anymore and deny what has happened.

Even so, this is no time to get recklessly drunk on victory and declare “mission accomplished.” Nor is this the time to bolt for the exits from an unpopular war. The peace, as Burns and Reid say, is perilous and only just now beginning. The war is still not actually even over, though the fighting has been greatly reduced. Every single last inch of progress can be reversed. Keeping the relative peace will be just as difficult, though less dangerous, than making it in the first place. “[J]udging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year,” they wrote, “as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 — the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.”

It is a long ways from over in Iraq, and probably just as far in Afghanistan due to the Pakistani government’s refusal to clamp down on the Taliban there. But we’re on the upside of the battle now, at last….

I need to update my morning post on Stephen Biddle, Michael O’Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack’s new article at Foreign Affairs, “Standing Down as Iraq Stands Up.”

As noted, the piece isn’t all that impressive. Most of the analysis seems somewhat behind the curve of events, and the conclusion’s basically the authors’ attempt to curry favor within the Democratic foreign policy establishment by re-floating the “Bush lied” meme on the origins of the deployment.

Well, the antiwar bloggers aren’t too happy no matter the motives. Indeed, this liberal warhawk-neocon triumvirate is being attacked just like the old days, although not just as war cheerleaders for the GOP imperialist project, but as enablers of American war crimes in Iraq to boot!

The meme’s getting a lot of play, but Spencer Ackerman’s attack is the most vociferous:

Matt Yglesias is on vacation until his new ThinkProgress blog launches August 11. But he IMs to ensure I don’t miss this argument in the new Steve Biddle/Mike O’Hanlon/Ken Pollack Iraq piece in Foreign Affairs:

It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.

I had to reread this to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Ethnic cleansing is a violent process of extirpating members of a rival ethnicity or sect. If the ethnic cleansing occurred in 2006, of course casualties went up consistently. This argument makes no sense.

But there’s actually a broader point to make. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven’t experienced them. What you really, really shouldn’t do is treat other people’s ethnic cleansing as a debaters’ point. It’s perverse, isn’t it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.

I’d be remiss not to send a quick message to Yglesias: Dude, take some time off. You’re going to be swamped with that new, nasty gig at Think Progress.

But back to the debate at hand!

Actually, it’s not illogical for sectarian violence to have dropped if the term “cleansing” is recognized in its very common useage as a broad shorthand for the consolidation of ethnic neighborhoods and the internal displacement of populations from their homes. Iraq’s ethnic cleansing has not generally been seen as genocidal. Indeed, surge proponents using this shorthand terminology have been savagely attacked for allegedly seeking to minimize the refugee tragedy of “millions of Iraqis being robbed of their homes.”

The fact is that the antiwar hordes have never accepted the COIN strategy of President George Bush and General David Petraeus. The victory of the beefed-up troop contingents along with the tactical adjustments on the ground have long been slandered as an alleged “false narrative” of success. Just over a week ago some of the most implacable Bush-bashers on the left smeared success under the surge as a myth, or that perhaps it has “worked tactically, but hasn’t succeeded strategically, at least not yet.”

Yet now, with all the mainstream political actors accepting the new realities of Iraq - including both John McCain and Barack Obama - most of the antwar contingents are seeking to push the war debate past the question of victory to that of culpability in alleged American atrocities.

This all ties into the big push on the left for “accountability” of the Bush administration foreign policy decisions, such as the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the domestic surveillance operations and the question of telecom immunity.

Ideally, for war opponents, Bush administration “criminals” would be prosecuted for war crimes under a Barack Obama administration come January 2009. What’s most likely to happen, in the advent of an Obama regimes, is that Congress would establish a “commission on torture” to investigate alleged wrong-doing under the Bush-Cheney years. Yet, the recent hard-left uproar over Obama-advisor Cass Sunstein’s recent dismissal of war crimes prosecutions indicates that the antiwar forces want a bit more than “truth and reconcilliation.”

Thus, today’s uproar over the Biddle, O’Hanlon, and Pollack essay can be seen as building more war crimes charges against the administration.

The whole thing may well end being a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially as Barack Obama’s been dropping in the polls like an anchor.

On the other hand, the war crimes push is an international movement, and U.S. bloggers like Ackerman, Ezra Klein, and the crew at Newshoggers - with no substantive loyalty to the principle of American sovereignty - would like nothing more than the establishment of a universal jurisdiction of vengeance and star chamber prosecutions of Bush’s neo-imperialist cabal next year.

~cross-posted at American Power

Over the past five days we’ve been inundated with all sorts of talking points emanating from the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and the leftwing echochamber of the blogosphere that one, the Iraqis, President Bush, and Gen. Petraeus have mirabile dictu suddenly found the wisdom of the Great Man’s pronouncements on Iraq vis-a-vis the “timetable” for the withdrawal of US forces in Iraq freeing them up for General Obama’s coming campaign to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the “real focus” of the “Global War on Terror”. What utter nonsense.

Leaving aside the utter fatuousness of their claims as regards the complex problems in Afghanistan that I alluded to in my article of Monday 21 July of which a greater troop presence is hardly the solution in and of itself there’s the small problem of the fact that the only thing the improved security situation in Iraq has to do with Obama’s magical sixteen month timeline is one of mere coincidence. Contrary to the received wisdom of the braying jackasses in the press who likened the president’s acceptance of a “time horizon” to some kind of volte face on Iraq the president has always been of the position that our troop levels there will be contingent on both the level of security and the Iraq’s ability to “stand up as we stand down”:

“The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists,” he said. “And that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

Note that these remarks were delivered exactly three years ago in June. Besides, as we all know from our reading of the malarial swamps that constitute the antiwar blogosphere the president couldn’t possibly be backing a drawdown of forces since it is our aim to have a strong US military garrison in Iraq manning those supposedly permanent bases for decades yet to come. Have the Obamaites, in their adoration, begun drinking White House-spiked Kool Aid?

And now comes the charge of the keyboard kommandos of the Kossack Army alleging that John McCain is “lying” about the surge and the Anbar Awakening or worse yet doesn’t understand it at all. Another half-truth masquerading as the truth. Ilan Goldenberg is not a stupid person but he’s leaving out quite a bit of what actually went down in Anbar in 2006.

For most of the war, the US had been employing pretty heavy-handed tactics which consisted of making smash and grab sweeps from FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) which only repeated many of the mistakes of Vietnam and had little effect upon the enemy in that they were overly concerned with body counts and bringing massive firepower to play to kill a few bad guys and then hightail it back to the FOB leaving the locals to fend for themselves. This proved pretty ineffective in Anbar and it alienated the very people we were trying to win over.

Through most of 2005 and into early 2006, General David Petraeus, mastermind of the “surge”, after having served as division commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the war’s early days in Mosul and enjoying some success there by employing classic counterinsurgent tactics, busied himself at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas with writing the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Manual which hadn’t been updated since Vietnam. It was distributed to the Army beginning in 2006 and surge-like tactics started although the extra troops would only get fully in place in the summer of 2007. And this was begun in Anbar province beginning with Tal Afar as related by Col. H.R. McMaster, one of Petraeus’s key lieutenants, and the commander of a regiment of the 3rd Armored Cav, related to Laura Logan in an interview in ‘06:

But Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that using numbers to measure victory is a mistake.

“Body counts are completely irrelevant. I mean, what is relevant is, ‘Is the population secure so that political development, economic development can proceed?’” he explains.

So the U.S. military began training a new police force right away, recruiting both Shiites and Sunnis to patrol the streets. Schools and markets were reopened. And Col. McMaster was able to bring together religious leaders who hadn’t spoken for months.

American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through the city, he is part politician and part policeman.”

And in another interview last fall, this one with lefty Laura Rozen of Mother Jones, McMaster talked about the early on shift in tactics in ‘06:

MJ: And you guys have had big success doing that in Anbar? Is that right?

HRM: Yes, it’s a huge success in Al Anbar province and there are also successes that were underreported, or maybe not fully understood, previous to that in Ninewa province, which is where our regiment operated and where the First Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division operated before us in Mosul. They really stopped this cycle of ethnic violence predominantly in Mosul between Kurds and Sunni Arabs and other sub-communities within that city of two-and-a-half million people. The success in Anbar has now spread to Baghdad, Babil, Diyala, and Salah ad Din provinces. Ours and Iraqi forces have been able to break that cycle of sectarian violence and create the conditions for sustainable stability in some of the most critical mixed-sectarian areas. This approach of emphasizing population security, breaking the cycle of sectarian violence, rekindling hope among the population, lifting the pall of fear off the people, and then actively engaging the various communities to bring about political accommodation is working at the local level. What’s key now is to sustain that effort at the local level and try to elevate those successes to the national level. Now, one of the things that is going for the Iraqis, and for us in that connection, is how tired they are of the violence. The number one cross-cutting issue is security. My personal experience in Ninewa province has been that at the most fundamental level people don’t really care if it’s a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that’s providing them security, as long as that force treats them with respect.

MJ: Is that really true of the Sunni tribal sheikhs?

HRM: If you have a force that’s professional, that’s well led, that treats people with respect, that’s not advancing a narrow sectarian agenda in a way that’s destabilizing to the situation, people will accept that force after a period of learning about that force and meeting the people. It doesn’t happen easily, and it takes what we call an information campaign, a real effort to reintroduce the Iraqi population to their own security forces. When we first went to Iraq we thought, “Hey, there is a big part of this culture that has to do with mediation and we’re going to have to look for Iraqi mediators to really help us with the population.” What we have found is that we were the principle mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role. Now you don’t want to create dependency. A big part of this problem is not just the capability of Iraqi security forces but their legitimacy. One of the ways to do it is you recruit from the population. What we found is probably the best setup is a combination of indigenous forces, mainly in the police force, but also some outside forces too, that help insulate these security forces from some of the tribal pressures associated with criminality, for example, or a particular tribal agenda. So you don’t want a homogeneous force, but a force that is, at least to some degree, representative of the local population.

What the people yammering on about the Anbar Awakening predating the “surge” don’t seem to fully understand is that the additional combat troops (not a large number given the tooth to tail ratio in many US units) are only one part of the overall strategy. As equally important is the shift in tactics and giving the locals a chance to earn the trust of the occupier and take over the task of their own protection. With it comes vastly better intelligence which in counterinsurgency is half of the battle. For most of the war the US Marine Corps had taken up most of the battle in Anbar province including both of the bloody Battles of Fallujah in 2004. But here too the shift in tactics started to take place in the summer of 2006 as part of the overall “surge” strategy as related by a reporter from Stars and Stripes:

. . .Marine after Marine here says a revival of classic Marine anti-insurgency doctrine is helping them turn the tide from a conventional fight toward a sophisticated anti-insurgency that is cutting into insurgent support.

During the last three months, his Marines have begun using bold counterinsurgency tactics, putting companies on the streets of insurgent strongholds where they fight while finessing locals. Some small teams slip from house to house, paying families to put them up for brief periods.

Squad leaders liken the effort to campaigning for office back home: a street-level, round-the-clock effort to be a positive, responsive presence while going person by person, street by street, settlement by settlement between Ramadi on the west and Fallujah on the east.

The moral of this story is that it’s foolish and inane to try and separate out the additional troop part of the “surge” from the larger mission which involves not only more troops in certain areas but a broad-based shift in strategy and tactics on all fronts.

What has not really changed in this, however, is the fact that Barack Obama’s focus hasn’t been on winning the war in Iraq it’s been on simply leaving it behind by whatever means necessary and that ranges from the kickoff of his campaign sixteen months or so ago when he said he would have all US combat forces out of Iraq by March 2008 to his op-ed in last week’s New York Times when he ended by simply stating — “It’s time to end this war”.

~by John McCain

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

~by Bill Harrison

“We have been all over India and we have decided that India isn’t big enough for such as us.”

“We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.”

British Indian Army Sergeants Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) and “Peachey” Carnehan (Michael Caine) to Rudyard Kipling announcing that they are off to Kafiristan in John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

Barack Obama in an op-ed appearing in the New York Times on July 14, 2008

________________________________________________________

Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama is not proposing any sort of “new strategy” for Afghanistan, what are the challenges facing the United States, Afghanistan and our NATO partners in stabilizing Afghanistan against a Taliban insurgency allied with al Qaeda that emanates across the border with Pakistan? Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order here.

The provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan where most of the trouble is and the sanctuaries for the militants across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are the realm of the Pashtuns, fiercely independent tribesmen whose resistance to central authority goes back to the time of classical antiquity and Alexander the Great’s inability to bring the area under his control. But while the Pashtuns are uniformly hostile to attempts to control them from afar they are also hospitable to outsiders who come as travelers as is codified in the Pashtunwali, or “Way of the Pashtuns”, their unwritten tribal code. This code governs all forms of Pashtun societal intercourse from the local ruling councils (jirgas) to the conception of honor (nang) and most importantly for our purposes here nanawatey or “truce/asylum”.

We are all now familiar (or should be so) with Osam bin Laden’s “last stand” at Tora Bora in 2001 and his subsequent flight with his band of Uzbek, Chechen and Arab fighters into the FATA back in December of 2001. Not long thereafter a report surfaced in the Washington Post (article no longer available on the web) from an American filmmaker traveling in the region that he encountered foreign militants living openly in the tribal regions as “honored guests”. This would be fully in keeping with the Pashtunwali’s emphasis on giving succor to outsiders provided that they observe tribal customs. Most Americans would be astounded to learn this but until the Soviet war it was quite possible to travel in this region (with connected local escorts, of course) as a Westerner without undue fear as did a friend of mine who was studying Hindi and the local languages and history of the region while we were both graduate students at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s and had traveled there as an undergraduate in the mid 1970s.

In reality the border separating Afghanistan from the FATA is more of an arbitrary division. The Durand Line separating the two has never been accepted in Afghanistan and is merely a British contrivance left over from the days of the “Great Game” in southwest Asia of the mid-nineteeth century. These are Pashtun lands on both sides of this line of demarcation and the Pakistani government and army in Islamabad composed of Punjabis has over the years from time to time encouraged militancy in the area as a form of exerting influence over its neighbor Afghanistan. The Taliban (Pashto for students) originiated in the refugee camps of the FATA during the Soviet-Afghan war and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may or may not be (probably the latter) purged of Taliban-al Qaeda sympathizers with most of this faction allied with the former head of the ISI — Gen. Hamid Gul whose views in this regard should be viewed with alarm.

Under the Musharraf government, Pakistan would make periodic forays into the FATA in brief but bloody engagements with local militants. But the Pakistani army is composed of primarily Punjabi officers and the paramilitary Frontier Corps (which goes back to the famed Khyber Rifles of the British raj) composed of local Pashtuns is poorly equipped and led. Over the past seven years these engagements have brought little in the way of stability to the region or succeeded in neutralizing the troublemakers but they have alienated many of the local tribles. Periodic truces with the militants have accomplished little more. And economic aid projects in the area, of equal importance to security operations, have not really gone forward and planned stepped up US aid to Pakistan in this regard remain mired over questions of possible corruption in Islamabad.

Now no one questions the need for additional ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made repeated calls for more soldiers from our NATO allies but aside from a battalion of French special forces and the continuing commitment of Danish, Dutch, Canadian and UK soldiers to the spear’s tip in the south and east the rest of NATO continues to sit on its collective hands. Things have gotten so bad in this respect that even former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has lambasted his fellow Germans and the Merkel government for refusing to allow Bundeswehr soldiers to serve in the fighting area. Nor are things much better on the economic aid front which is just as important as the military effort. At a recent donors conference in Paris in June, while the United States pledged 1/5th of the total $50 billion pledged, the EU contingent’s pledge amounted to a niggardly $770 million.

Notwithstanding the recent spectacular attack that claimed the lives of nine US soldiers, there have been successes in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Aid projects and tribal security have been improved and the militants seldom launch the type of attack mentioned above. Building on the success of similar tactics employed in Iraq, US forces have begun deploying Human Terrain Teams to the area which employ an array of both ’soft” and “hard” power in classic counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

So while it is clear that what Barack Obama is talking about isn’t any sort of “new” strategy at all the central fact remains that until such time as the Pakistani government alters its approach in the FATA, and indeed its policies in this regard as described by Jim Hoagland yesterday in the Washington Post can best be called delusional, any such beefed up NATO presence across the border is likely to come to very little in solving this problem in the long run. In Vietnam, despite the presence of 500,000 US soldiers and Marines the war effort there even after the change in tactics to “clear and hold” under Gen. Creighton Abrams who replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as MACV CINC in ‘69 and the US incusion into Cambodia as long as North Vietnamese forces were able to use Cambodia and Laos as staging and supply areas there could be no good outcome. At present I am at wit’s end as to offer a suggested plan to get Pakistan off its duff in the FATA or to address the massive problems associated with the growing of opium poppies in both Afghanistan and the FATA that finance much of the instability on both sides of the border and are the source of the world’s heroin supply. If Barack Obama has a plan in this regard, I’m all ears but so far all I’m hearing is the typical lofty and pretty empty rhetoric that isn’t even true as regards recent US actions in the area.

Author’s Note: While the opinions expressed in this piece are mine and mine alone I wish to acknowledge the work of fellow Newsvine members and friends Shaheen Buneri (who reports from the region) and BlaiseP. Their knowledge of the region and its peoples has much to teach us all and I would strongly suggest that fellow Newsviners visit their columns often.

Good news from the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in the mountainous tribal region currently playing host to both the resurgent Taliban and the quasi-defunct Osama bin Laden.

Locals say that a grand Jirga of eleven sub tribes of Orakzai tribe was held Friday at the Dabori area of the agency in which tribal elders and local religious scholars expressed their grave concern over the raising militancy in the tribal region.

The Jirga decided to unite and expel all foreign militants from the tribal agency and help the military to regain control over the security checkposts earlier occupied by militants of the Pakistan Taliban Movement.

It’s not always easy to unite against the growing power of the Taliban however.  They have grown increasingly strong in the last few years, insulated and untouchable amongst the Pashtuns.  The Pakistani government is basically impotent without tribal cooperation, so this could come as a major turning point on that front.

So far, 250 tribal elders have been killed by different militant groups in FATA. Most of the slain tribal elders were supporting government agencies against the Taliban. Some reports suggest that a large number of tribal elders also migrated to other parts of the country due to fear of a Taliban backlash in the past.

This is similar to the situation on the ground in Iraq, until sheiks there finally took a stand against foreign fighters and al Qaeda.  Speaking of those sheiks–

Sheik Ahmad al-Rishawi has studied the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and believes he can help lead a rebellion against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and wants to fight alongside Americans to put his plans into action.

I say, if the rest of the world is unwilling to throw its weight behind America in Afghanistan and finally, once and for all, put an end to the Afghani peoples suffering there, then we need more sheiks like Ahmad al-Rishawi.

(more…)

There is little doubt that the notion most Americans have in their heads of neoconservatism has been at least temporarily skewed due to the perceived failures in Iraq. Regardless of the fact that things are actually improving on the ground finally, the bad taste left in many proverbial mouths when uttering the term “neocon” is more than apparent.

Of course, the fact is what the vast majority of people associate with neoconservatism is, in fact, a complete misconception of what it actually means to be a neoconservative. Even Kristol’s article may be only one aspect, one perspective on what it means to be a neocon. Indeed, a whole new generation of neoconservative thinkers is sprouting up, both here in the US and overseas.  Why?  Irving Kristol says it well,

(more…)