Bhutto assassination reverberates across Afghanistan

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto last week continues to ring across Afghanistan, as American officials worry that it heralds the rise of a more virulent extremism against the Pakistani government that could undermine the Afghan mission. It could also damage the burgeoning strategic relationship between the two neighbors, and hurt efforts to fight cross-border terrorism.

State to cut 10% of diplomatic posts worldwide

Citing strains from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has announced it will cut diplomatic posts by 10% next year. State has had trouble filling 250 foreign service jobs in Iraq and another 100 "high priority" jobs in Afghanistan. It has finally brought these embassies to 100% occupancy -- but at the cost of leaving other posts vacant.  Shortfalls result because State's operating expenses come out of the supplemental, but the correlated increase in personnel costs must come out of State's regular budget. 

Ironically, the most vocal supporter of boosting State's regular budget has been none other than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. On Nov. 26, he noted that "funding for nonmilitary foreign affairs programs . . . remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military. . . . The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department . . . is less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone."

We've repeatedly highlighted this disparity, and argued that it is deeply undercutting our chances of success in Afghanistan. America is engaged in a "struggle of ideas" that it cannot afford to lose. Amidst a half trillion dollars in military spending this year, does it make any sense to cut critical (and cheap) diplomats? MORE

U.S. to Cut 10 Percent of Diplomatic Posts Next Year By Karen DeYoung (WP) Thursday, Dec 13: Diplomatic posts at the State Department and U.S. embassies worldwide will be cut by 10 percent next year because of heavy staffing demands in Iraq and Afghanistan, Director General Harry Thomas informed the foreign service yesterday.

Video: Interview with Gen. McNeill, Rashid, MacDonald

Yesterday, the NewsHour with Jim Leherer ran a good segment on Afghanistan featuring commentary by Gen. Dan McNeill, Ahmed Rashid, and Norine MacDonald (from Senlis Council). The transcript, along with streaming video, is available here.

Center on Public Integrity updates its contractor database

The Center for Public Integrity has just updated its Windfalls of War report, an investigation of US contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The original report, published in 2003, won the George Polk Award for journalism. It took six months to complete and involved a research team of 20 (along with  73 Freedom of Information Requests!)

The updated report, which lists the top 100 contractors, has some striking findings:

• "U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006."
• "Iraq remains the clear priority of the U.S. government, the Center's research shows, with more than seven times as many contracting dollars designated for spending there as for Afghanistan."
• "Of the $13 billion awarded through cost-plus contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2004 to 2006, 30 percent was awarded through simple cost-plus, fixed-fee arrangements that offer no incentives for performance or cost savings."

The Center for Public Integrity website includes a search engine that crawls hundreds of budget documents, including reports, audits, testimony, project site inspections and correspondence. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively difficult to disaggregate spending in Afghanistan from that in Iraq in the current format (this is, in part, a function of the way many of these expenses are deliberately melded in budget documents.) I have contacted the folks at CPI, and will see if we can compile a list of the top contractors (and contracts) in Afghanistan.

Quoteboard

"I'm not in the business of turning down jobs I haven't been offered."
  - Paddy Ashdown

"I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots. The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley...Being an insurgent would be so easy."
  - Sgt. Jacob Stockdill

"All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans."
  - Capt. Chris Rowe
MORE

Ashdown headed to Kabul as "super-envoy"?

According to new reports, Paddy Ashdown, the former EU-UN High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been offered a newly created position in Kabul as a "super envoy" that would head Afghanistan efforts by NATO, the UN, and perhaps the EU as well.

According to a NATO diplomat quoted yesterday in the Financial Times, “Ashdown’s name seems to be the only one in play. I understand that Karzai is comfortable with that and it seems as if the ball is now in Ashdown’s court.” Other names floated for the position have included Joschka Fischer and Hikmet Cetin, former foreign ministers of Germany and Turkey.

Ashdown's name has been bandied about since June, but he was reluctant to consider the job unless he had the endorsement of the United States. Then recently the dual-hatted position was championed by Nicholas Burns, the number three man in the US State Dept. There remains disagreement over the nature of the role, according to Karzai spokesman Hamayun Hamidzada, who notes in The Scotsman that "Britain wants a Kabul-based envoy, who would co-ordinate people here, and also in the capitals. The US thinks you need a roving envoy going from capital to capital." 

Will Ashdown accept? In June, he said there was the need for such a post:  "My view, for what it is worth, is that there needs to be a single figure out there pulling all the strands together. At the moment there is little or no co-ordination and the country is starting to work against itself." 

The change could greatly improve coordination and elevate the status of the UN in Afghanistan. It would require a tremendously skilled  manager and coordinator to make it all work -- something Ashdown was able to do quite well in Bosnia. In a WSJ op-ed last month, Hans Binnendijk argued that "a new, high-profile European High Representative under U.N. auspices should be appointed to pull together the diverse national contributions in Afghanistan and to coordinate military and economic approaches into a comprehensive and coherent whole. Paddy Ashdown provides a good example with his work in Bosnia. Such a High Representative could also help convince European publics to stick with the Afghan effort." The challenge will be coordinating with the US and with the Afghan government, which as a sovereign state would never grant Ashdown the level of authority he had in Bosnia.

Photo: Paddy Ashdown (aka Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon...) 

Thinking like an insurgent: the Army's new academy

The Wall St Journal has a front page, 2,300 word piece this morning on the U.S. Army's "Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy", which was established this April to improve tactics. Last year the Army unveiled a new counterinsurgency doctrine, but its dissemination has been slow; when one of its authors, Lt. Col. John Nagl went to Afghanistan he saw "uneven understanding of counterinsurgency principles."

Capt. Dan Helmer, the 26-year old Rhode Scholar who set up the 'school' in six weeks notes that "We're trying to win an argument that supporting the government is worth risking your life for." That's a tough sell right now, and requires an approach which is 80% military and 20% political, according to Helmer. 

The Army says they've made great progress this year in giving troops Afghanistan-specific training before deployment, but current deployment patterns aren't providing enough time for learning. "There isn't enough time between being told that they're going and getting them through the training," says Lou Gelling, deputy commander of the Army's battle command training program. "That's the reality of it." Sounds like a lot of the training right now is supplemental, not comprehensive: five day courses for 60 soldiers at a time in a makeshift classroom.

As usual, one of the central problems ties back to Afghanistan's status as America's "second war":

The counterinsurgency training sometimes seems targeted more toward Iraq, according to Capt. Helmer and Col. Nagl. Of the 90 men under Col. Nagl's command, almost all are Iraq veterans and just one has served in Afghanistan. Even Capt. Helmer's orders to Afghanistan included the mistaken, but telling, instruction to take a course in Arabic -- a language spoken in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan.

The article is subscriber only content, but here are a few excerpts:

In Counterinsurgency Class, Soldiers Think Like Taliban, Wall Street Journal, By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS, Nov 30, KABUL:A natural-born insurgent, Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill was brimming with malicious suggestions when a group of American soldiers and Afghan security men sat down last month to plot their own defeat. MORE

Classified proposal: enlist Pakistan's tribes against AQ

US military officials confirmed this weekend that a special operations plan is in the works to arm and empower Pakistani tribal leaders against foreign extremists. The proposal is modeled on efforts in Anbar province, Iraq, where Sunni sheiks were enlisted to turn local Iraqis against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The Times notes that "Some other elements of the campaign have been approved in principle by the Americans and Pakistanis and await financing, like $350 million over several years to help train and equip the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that now has about 85,000 members and is recruited from border tribes" but adds that "the classified proposal to enlist tribal leaders is new."

The story also notes that a group of Pakistan experts convened in March thought the proposal had its merits, but that successes 'would be difficult to achieve, particularly in the north (Bajaur) and south (North and South Waziristam.' Not only has the tribal leadership been eviscerated in these regions, but there is a great skepticism about working with the United States and the Pakistani army. This seems to me the great -- and perhaps insurmountable -- challenge with such an approach...

Gordon Adams on the Pentagon-Pakistan "slush fund"

Gordon Adams has a great post on Democracy Arsenal which takes a closer look at Pentagon payments to Pakistan (which are only now coming under scrutiny in congress). Here's a clip (Note: there's more on DoD's usurpation of roles once performed by State in Adam's Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article...):

The Los Angeles Times of November 18, 2007 reports that the Pentagon is looking into Coalition Support payments to Pakistan (of which $5.3 b have been made to date), because documentation of the Pakistani spending supposedly being reimbursed is too thin...One unnamed official, who tracks these payments, told the LA Times: “"Backdoor subsidies is what it can look like to some more skeptical observers, because there hasn't been good oversight and the amounts involved have been so great.  There is suspicion that it's a slush fund."

No kidding! Count me a “skeptical observer.”  So now the Pentagon, which has no expertise at making foreign assistance payments directly to other governments or at tracking them after they are made, are going to play catch-up ball with this program. MORE

Sarah Chayes on Arghandab, the Taliban, and GoA meddling

Sarah Chayes has a piece today in the Washington Post in which she recalls, from her front row seat, the Taliban incursion into Arghandab in the wake of Mullah Naqib's heart attack.

Her verdict is deeply troubling: despite a successful coalition counterattack, the Taliban operation  "was a deft, successful psychological operations action":

It said that, despite the likelihood that they would attack after the death of Mullah Naqib, no obstacle was thrown up to oppose them, and they were able to walk into the district. The targeting of the mullah's house was a deliberate affront. It said: "You see, o men of no honor? You can't even protect his house. You are nothing now." The sum of these messages was aimed at the ordinary people who are the prize in any insurgency: Our encroachment is inevitable, the Taliban said. You should align yourselves with the inevitable.

Equally troubling is the Government of Afghanistan's response. Immediately after Mullah Naqib's death, President Karzai, along with his two brothers and the governor of Kandahar, "interfered in the recent selection of a new elder, sidelining a man who had been Mullah Naqib's deputy during the anti-Soviet jihad." "If anyone knew how to fight the Taliban in Arghandab, it was he," argues Chayes, "And yet the government's machinations were plainly aimed at shutting him out" in favor of a more pliable replacement, the untried son of Mullah Naqib. Their goal, she implies, is to ram through an alluring -- but dangerously flawed  -- reconciliation with the Taliban.

A Mullah Dies, and War Comes Knocking, By Sarah Chayes, Nov 18, KANDAHAR: Wednesday, Oct. 31: I woke to the sound of artillery thudding -- like the beat of a heavy heart. It was Afghan army batteries firing into Arghandab, at new Taliban positions there. Through several nights, I had been listening, my ears pricking like a dog's, to the faint popping of gunfire, the clattering of helicopters, the whine of personnel carriers speeding along the roads, falling asleep only when the morning call to prayer rang out in the pre-dawn chill.

I can't explain how this felt, the penetration of war to this crucial part of Kandahar, where I have lived for six years. Arghandab district, with its riot of tangled fruit trees, is the lung of Kandahar province; its meandering, stone-studded river is the artery of the whole region. Arghandab is shade and water, and mud-walled orchards, and mulberries and apricots, and pomegranates the size of grapefruits hanging from the willowy branches. MORE