Iran and Time

The mainstream media’s coverage of Iran continues to suck. Joe Klein of TIME magazine just posted a short piece that mentioned “the discovery of the nuclear reactor at Qom, a secret facility that seems to have been built for research into weaponization. The Russians were as surprised by this as everyone else was.”

The nuclear facility he’s referring to is not a reactor; it’s a uranium enrichment plant. Perhaps Klein doesn’t understand the difference. Not everybody was surprised by the plants existence. We have known about its existence for years. The Iranians reveled its existence, months before it was required to under the Non-Proliferaton treaty, and it has given the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) full access to inspect it, and the IAEA says there is “nothing to be worried about.” IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei calls the site “a hole in a mountain.”

A story making the rounds of the echo chamber says that Iran’s disclosure of the Qom facility “raises questions about the existence of other such facilities.” What a crock of poppycock. We’d know if there were other sites like the one at Qom the same way we know about the one at Qom. Our spy satellites are rather good at picking up those sorts of things.

President Obama says “we are running out of time” for Iran to agree to the dope deal where they give Russia most of their uranium and Russia gives it to France. Obama and the rest of his witless security team need to take a time out. They intend to sit on the decision of whether or not to re-re-escalate the war in Afghanistan for December. Iran’s decision on what to do about their nuclear energy program is every bit as important to them as our decision about Afghanistan is, arguably even more important. We can probably afford to make a few more mistakes in Afghanistan and still remain the world’s sole superpower. A nuclear energy program is Iran’s only future. If they blow things now by giving up their right to refine their own uranium, they’re a bowl full of Shemps. It only makes sense for them to take their time figuring out their next step.

One hears that Iran is unstable, that its government and institutions are fractioned. One can also make that assessment of the United States. Our right-left, red-blue national debate has become so derisive as to be the laughingstock of the rest of the planet. America has become two countries. It’s as if we never fought the Civil War. Maps of red and blue states look nearly identical to pre-Civil War maps of slave states and territories and free states and territories. (That tells you something about the Rush Limbaugh/FOX News crowd, doesn’t it?)

We’ve heard a lot about how Iran’s latest election was stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad though we really know nothing about that election. We know for sure that our puppet in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, stole two elections in matter of months, and we’re calling him a “legitimate” head of state. Who does Karzai think he is, George W. Bush? The upstart!

Ahmadinejad has said a lot of unfortunate things, probably for consumption in Iran and in the Muslim world, mostly about Israel, most of which has been misinterpreted and misquoted. But he’s hardly a Hitler, and he’s not the real power in Iran anyway. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is. (Khamenei has also had Agmadinijad’s president job, so he knows how power works in Iran.)

Iran has good reason to mistrust the west, especially American and Israel. We’ve been threatening to attack them for a long time. It’s little wonder that they built an enrichment facility in cave to protect it from being bombed, though that probably did them little good. We’re developing a new bunker buster bomb, a non-nuclear, 30,000-pound, precision-guided kahuna that contains more than ten times the explosive power or our present bunker busters, and our present bunker busters can bust the living daylights out of bunkers.

Iran wisely refuses to give up its “inalienable right” to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and it would be insane to give up its prerogative to refine uranium. Iran’s desire to have a nuclear energy industry reflects a desire on its part to emerge as a regional economic power. We need to get used to the idea that emerging nations want to, uh, emerge, and start partnering with them.

Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Our intelligence agencies, despite pressure from the neoconservative cabal, have certified as much, as has the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is serious question as to whether it ever had a nuclear weapons program at all.

Iran is doubtless keep a card up its sleeve, or is at least pretending to be, but none of the accusations made against it—from nuclear weapons ambitions to arming militants in Iraq and Afghanistan—have ever been backed up with genuine evidence.

Yes, we need to hold the Iranians’ feet to the fire, and we need to make them prove they’re not working toward building nuclear weapons, but we don’t need to rant and rave about them.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Our National Dissonance

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

-- Bertrand Russell

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on the Sunday gab circuit that rooting al-Qaeda out from Afghanistan is our only goal in that country. That’s interesting, considering that the “maximum estimate,” according to National Security Adviser James Jones, says there are at most 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Since there are roughly 100,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, we already outnumber them 100 to one. Why does Gen. Stanley McChrystal insist we need more troops to avoid mission failure?

Our biggest problem is that we don’t really know what we’re doing there. On ABC’s This Week, Hillary said, "We're not interested in staying in Afghanistan. We have no long-term stake there. We want that to be made very clear."

That’s in stark contrast to what Pentagon types have been putting out. In the latest issue Joint Force Quarterly, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen wrote, “The most common questions that I get in Pakistan and Afghanistan are: ‘Will you really stay with us this time?’ ‘Can we really count on you?’ I tell them that we will and that they can.”

In a recent appearance on Al Jazeera, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "both Afghanistan and Pakistan can count on us for the long term."

The Pentagon has been trying to make Afghanistan the spine of its Long War, a concept that envisions 50 years of low-level armed conflict that will ensure the gravy caisson keeps rolling along. They probably don’t like Hillary saying we don’t have a long-term stake there.

McChrystal was supposedly fuming when Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a retired Lt. Gen. who was once commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, sent cables to Washington saying that sending more troops there was “not a good idea.”

One of McChrystal’s top advisers on Afghanistan, counterinsurgency “expert” David Kilcullen, says the counterterrorism mandate isn’t “at the top of my list” for reasons to be in Afghanistan. Kilcullen thinks it’s far more important to stay the course in Afghanistan to preserve NATO, the dinosaur alliance that hasn’t had a useful function since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down 20 years ago.

Secretary Clinton said, "I have made it clear that we're not going to be providing any civilian aid to Afghanistan unless we have a certification that if it goes into the Afghan government in any form, that we're going to have ministries that we can hold accountable.”

We’ll never be able to hold Afghan ministries accountable. We’re stuck with Hamid Karzai, who just stole two elections, and whose brother is a heroin dealer on the CIA payroll, and who has ties to the Taliban. Oh, yeah, he’s going to clean up his act hubba hubba ‘cause Hillary told him to. He’s said to be forming a “high-level anti-corruption unit” to investigate graft among his senior officials. One suspects this anti-corruption unit will consist of the same crooks he assigned to rig his elections.

Hillary told ABC, “This is not the prior days when people would come on your show and talk about how we were going to help the Afghans build a modern democracy and build a more functioning state and do all of these wonderful things.”

Problem: that’s precisely what McChrystal proposes to do with his “classic counterinsurgency” plan, based on the Pentagon’s cockamamie COIN doctrine that amounts to giving birth to nations at gunpoint.

A recent report by the Army indicates that troop morale in Afghanistan is sagging. That shouldn’t surprise anybody. “They’re tired,” says psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen. Yeah, who wouldn’t be? The Army has been at war for eight years and change, and there’s no end in sight.

There’s also a significant question, one straight out of World War II rhetoric: was this trip necessary? I sense that as the war timeline shifts right, more and more of our rank and filers in uniform sense that the sacrifices they’re making are for naught. Much of service for one’s country is Orwellian. It involves accepting the brainwash one is constantly fed, even though at heart one knows it’s untrue. A break comes at some point, though, and that’s why we’re seeing so many cases of PTSD and other mental problems with our war veterans.

Our woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become our national cognitive dissonance. By now, all but the rabid among us know that our military adventurism is a counterproductive waste of effort, that we create two or more terrorists for every one we kill or capture, that our military and its supporting civilian and political structure have far more control of our government than they should.

Can we change course? Not easily. Can President Barack Obama put us on a vector of enlightenment? We’ll see. I for one am full of doubts on that score.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Bad Apples

The Independent posted a Nov. 15 story regarding allegations of sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers. The Ministry of Defense is investigating 33 new torture cases. Human rights groups caution that the British Army may face hundreds of claims of sexual and physical abuse.

The Independent outlined details more sordid than we need to repeat here, but suffice it to say that some sick British puppies pulled stunts that compare to what we know about our own shenanigans at Abu Ghraib, and need to be put down.

How do these things happen in supposedly disciplined armed services of supposedly civilized, enlightened nations?

There is a depraved, bigoted, small-minded segment of every society, and any country’s military is bound to reflect that. Take a look at how successful right-wing hate radio and FOX News are in America. Lamentably, the people who fall for the fear-and-loathing media madness tend to be the people who line up to join our military.

Militaries also tend to foster a sense of moral irresponsibility. Decisions concerning life and death and war and peace get made “above my pay grade.” Questioning ethically iffy policies isn’t good for one’s military career. A lot of congenital bullies achieve high rank (one might well argue that being a congenital bully is a requirement of achieving high rank.) When the boss is a bully, being the bully’s accomplice becomes the key to success.

The military’s senior officer corps, by and large, is a moral morass. The Pentagon’s military analyst program is a perfect example. Retired senior officers with financial ties to the military-industrial complex teamed up with the Pentagon to sell the case for war on the major news networks.

One wants to say that the vast majority of the rank and file is on the up and up, and I believe that is the case. Ultimately, though, the rottenest apples are at the top of the barrel, and that’s certainly the case in the military. The men involved in the military analyst program were, by and large, retired generals, many of them retired four-stars. They were sending American kids into harm’s way to line their own pockets.

Where do we find such men?

We don’t so much find them as make them. We have military academies where cadets and midshipmen spend their first summer learning a laundry list of senseless rules and spend the next four years learning to break them without getting caught. You couldn’t design a better system to foster moral ambiguity. That Christian fanaticism is promoted at the academies makes things even worse. (A senior Catholic chaplain told me, when I was a senior officer, that going to mass and receiving sacraments would “enhance” my military career.)

Whether fish rot from the tail up or from the head down is perhaps moot. But leaders are supposed to lead, and the military leaders we have now are leading us down the road to ruin.

Sun Tzu told us more than two thousand years ago that “No nation ever profited from a long war.” Yet a Long War is precisely what our current military mafia—which includes Gen. David Petraeus, Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. Ray Odierno and McChrystal—want us to buy into.

These brass hat cats are up to no good. They’re trying to keep us bogged down in Iraq as long as they possibly can. With the help of Petraeus’s media tent lad Thomas E. Ricks, they’ve converted the oafish Odierno from Desert Ox to the Eric Rommel of the surge in Iraq. Odierno is dumber than a truckload of landscape pebbles. When Colonel Timothy Reese noted that the Iraqi government and security forces were incompetent, corrupt and lazy, Odierno replied that those issue were mere “tactical issues.”

Odierno is the essence of our militaristic cognitive dissonance, where reality and perception differ so drastically that insane behavior erupts. Oderno, like most of the rest of our military and, unfortunately, most of the press, has a stake in clinging to the fantasy they created through media manipulation that the surge in Iraq was a success.

I’ve been listening to bloated right-wing hypocrite Bill Bennett making the argument on CNN that it’s in our vital interest to make a major military commitment to Af-Pak. Why Bennet, a proven neoconservative lunatic, still gets a microphone in the mainstream media is beyond reckoning. (He thinks Sarah Palin is good for the Republican Party. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.)

McChrystal’s media blitz against President Obama was a buck-naked attempt to subvert the Constitutional authority of the commander in chief.

It pains me no end to say these sorts of things. I loved the vast majority of the people I knew and worked with in the military. They were selfless, energetic, enthusiastic servants of their country. But those people didn’t become four-star officers who defied civilian authority and tried to lead their country into everlasting, counterproductive armed conflicts.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blamed the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on a “few bad apples.” The worst apples in the barrel were Rumsfeld himself and Dick Cheney, who set the tone that led to prisoner abuse and extra-judicial assassinations of “suspected” bad people. Mentally challenged Private Lynndie England spent years in prison over Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld, who was fired after the 2006 election took away the GOP’s majority in Congress, lives in a multi-million dollar home on the Eastern Shore by his pal Cheney, who is to date the greatest villain of the 21^st century.

“King David” Petraeus, the four-star shaman who created a false perception of success in Iraq by bribing bad guys not to shoot at us, runs our military now, and for all practical purposes, dictates our foreign policy.

We need to wrest control of our policies and our government away from our military, or we’ll go down the road of the Prussians, who eventually spawned Nazi Germany. President Dwight Eisenhower, who as a five-star general guided us to victory against Germany during World War II, warned us that the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex would persist, and it has.

Our military’s influence on the country has sprinted amok. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are being led by careerist cronies who are dedicated to preserving a perpetual state of conflict overseas that contribute nothing to national security.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Reading Af-Pak Tealeaves

It’s tough to tell what’s going to happen with Af-Pak. We get so many conflicting reports.

For a time, we heard that President Obama was leaning toward sending 30,000 additional troops there, and that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were encouraging him to do so.

Then we heard from National Security Adviser James Jones who said not to expect Obama to make a decision on Afghanistan troops levels until the first week in December.

Somewhere in between came a story from Pakistini Journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad that said Hillary had cut multi-dimensional dope deal with Pakistan’s military and intelligence service and the Indians and the Taliban and Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah that would give us a plausible exit out of Afghanistan.

President Obama has told the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rest of his security team to come up with an exit plan before he decides on a course of action. It’s remarkable that Obama, who has no direct military experience, should have to tell his military to include an exit plan in any strategy they bring him.

Or maybe it’s not. The Pentagon’s Long War philosophy is based on lack of exit plans.

Is it possible that Obama is willing to take a walk on the political wild side, admit that Afghanistan is anything but a “war of necessity,” and walk away from it?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s insistence that we need to commit up to 80,000 more American troops to the Afghanistan fandango and train up 400,000 Afghan troops and get more NATO Shemps involved in the effort is a pile of used oats.

Even our phony-baloney counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine admits “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.” We’re never going to get legitimate, effective governance in Afghanistan. We just let one of the biggest political crooks in history—Hamid Karzai—steal two elections. He’ll never be seen as a legitimate leader, no matter how many times President Obama exhorts him to begin a “new chapter.” (Dear diary, my brother Ahmed made another million dollars U.S. in the heroin trade today, and the CIA sent him another fat check besides. Boy, does Ahmed owe me!)

The COIN doctrine has become the false military promise of the 21^st century, having eclipsed naval power and air power and nuclear weapons as the ultimate answer to America’s security requirements and the leading excuse for our country’s distended military budget.

The difference between COIN and its militaristic philosophy predecessors is that its predecessors offered the promise to the end of war. Our foolhardy intercession in World War I—the war to end all wars, the war that would make the world “safe for democracy”—did neither. The lamentable end state of that horrible war set conditions that brought about Fascism and World War II, and the end state of World War II brought about global communism and the Cold War and the nasty little third world wars (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) that accompanied it.

After World War I, airpower was going to make all other forms of military power obsolete. After World War II, nuclear weapons were going to make all other forms of military power obsolete. Now we have COIN, which promises to make all forms of military power relevant for as long as our COIN wars last, which, if the American warmongery has its way, will be forever.

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker says Obama’s refusal to rush to judgment on Afghanistan “could be huge,” that maybe Obama is “putting his foot down.”

If so, it’s about time. Obama’s general and flag officers, specifically David Petraeus, Ray Odierno, Mike Mullen and Stan McChrystal have been used to getting their way for too long. I still wish Obama had transferred them to civilian command when he first came into office.

Hersh also makes note of the objection that US Ambassador to Afghanistan, former Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, has made to “deploying additional troops to the country." That apparently has McChrystal “fuming,” the poor guy. McChrystal should try getting some sleep.

If Obama is putting his foot down, that’s a good thing. If Obama goes along with McChrystal’s desire to escalate the war in Afghanistan, it will be a very bad thing. We’ll be stuck there forever. It will make Vietnam seem like a minor chapter in our history.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Say Nyet to Afghanistan

Mikhail Gorbachev, head of state of the Soviet Union when it withdrew from Afghanistan, has two words for Barack Obama: get out. Gorbachev, now 78, said in an interview in Berlin that he sees no chance of American success in Afghanistan even with more troops. “I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” he said. The U.S. “should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.”

Gorbachev noted there was little chance that Obama would take his advice. Maybe yes, maybe no.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos offers a ray of hope. He says Obama is looking for “off ramps” out of Afghanistan, Obama’s not satisfied with what he’s heard so far from his advisers, and well he should not be.

In early 2009 when Gen. Mark McKiernan was still in charge of Afghanistan, then brand new President Obama nixed a full bore surge of troops there because McKiernan couldn’t say what he’d do with them and the Joint Chiefs of Staff couldn’t describe an end state for the conflict. We still don’t have a coherent strategy for Afghanistan and there’s no end state in sight. If we continue to pour blood and money into Afghanistan, we’ll be there for at least another 20 years, and if we ever leave, we’ll have done more harm than good. We’re just recruiting terrorists.

Obama would do well to sack most of his senior advisers. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, is as full of gas as the Goodyear Blimp. He has said, “If we don’t get a level of legitimacy and governance [in Afghanistan], then all the troops in the world aren’t going to make any difference.” But he’s also part of the triumvirate that includes Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who want Obama to send 30,000 or more additional troops to Afghanistan. We won’t get legitimacy and governance in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai and his family are among the biggest crooks on the planet, and the CIA has been funding them. And we’re stuck with them.

Pakistan is controlled by its military and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). ISI has ties to all of the terrorist groups in the region, according to Pakistan’s former military leader Pervez Musharraf. Maybe that give some credence to reports that Hillary Clinton has taken to dealing directly with Pakistan’s military and the ISI.

But why should we even be bothering with these people? They’re not worth the trouble.

Any assertion that we’re in Af-Pak because of terrorism, or 9/11, is a crock of horse mustard. We’re not even sure whom we’re fighting there.

There are probably fewer than 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, and less than 300 of them in the tribal areas of Pakistan. We and our NATO coolies already have more than 100,000 troops in the theater. The Taliban, who aren’t a threat to our national security, number at best around 25,000. We already have a force advantage—when we count Afghan security forces, of 12 to one. If we give Stan McChrystal the U.S. troops he wants, and plus up Afghan forces to 400,00 as he projects, we’ll end up with an astronomical numeric advantage. And it won’t do a bit of good.

We’re experiencing the kind of madness C.S. Forester described in The General, a novel of World War I that notes how career British military officers drove their country to mindless slaughter of its youth and how mindless and spineless politicians let them get away with it. Forester is the one who compared the senseless trench warfare of the Great War to a group of dimwits haplessly trying to pull a screw out of the floor with a hammer claw, never imagining they could accomplish the task easily with a screwdriver.

Today’s American generals figure they can keep their wars going as long as they keep the friendly casualties low. They know, at some level, that the wars they’re in are unwinnable. But they don’t want to lose them, and as long as they can keep them going they won’t lose. That’s the crux of the Long War strategy, which isn’t so much a strategy as it is a theology, or an ideology, or something akin to voodoo.

The dudes behind the Long War—the top tier of which includes Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen—aren’t interested in defending America. They’re interested in preserving the military-industrial-congressional complex, and the trillion-plus dollar annual bite it takes out of the federal budget. (Plausible estimates place our military spending at almost $1.5 trillion, 54 percent of annual federal government spending.)

The latest media swag, from the increasingly war-friendly Washington Post, says that “Military planners will present President Obama with several options for how to proceed in Afghanistan on Wednesday afternoon that at a minimum would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops.”

How tragic. 20,000 troops won’t make a bit of difference in that conflict. It will just put 20,000 more American kids in harm’s way for no purpose. We committed a half-million troops to Vietnam and they didn’t to a bit of good there.

Gorbachev is right. We should be preparing to haul buns out of Afghanistan, not getting stuck further in the crack than we already are.

In a Veterans’ Day speech, Obama said, "As long as I am Commander in Chief, I am going to do right by [its service members]. American will not let you down, we will take care of our own.”

If Obama is serious about that promise, he’ll follow Gorbachev’s advice, not the hawkish screech chorus of his generals and their supporters in Congress and the press. Obama met today with his national security team for the eighth time for another skull dig, possibly the last one until he announces what he’s going to do about Af-Pak.

If Obama really wants out of Afghanistan, he doesn’t need an off ramp. He just needs to pull off the road his generals and the hawks in Congress want him to take.

Just say nyet, Mr. President. Pull the plug on this misadventure.

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and former general in command of forces in the country, has warned Obama against sending additional troops as well.

The good news: Obama has rejected the four options that his national security team has presented him. It’s sounding more every day like he’s come to his senses, and understands Afghanistan is not a “war of necessity,” and wants a way out.

As Seymour Hersh told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC Wednesday night, Obama may be putting his foot down. Let’s hope so. It’s about time.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Wacky War

Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen finally told it like it is. "If we don't get a level of legitimacy and governance [in Afghanistan],” he confessed, “then all the troops in the world aren't going to make any difference."

We’re not going to get legitimacy and governance in Afghanistan. We’re stuck with Hamid Karzai, and he’s a moral and ethical shipwreck. As columnist Bernd Debusmann says, “The United States and its NATO allies are fighting on the side of a corrupt and discredited government in a war, now in its ninth year, for which, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, there can be no purely military solution.”

There’s no solution of any kind for Afghanistan. Crooked politicians. Warlords. Multiple flavors of Taliban and other militant groups whose name nobody can remember or spell correctly. A population that hates us worse than any of the local hooligans they have to endure.

The Pentagon, including Mullen, wants us to pour more blood and treasure into this bog even though they know there’s everything to be lost by doing so and nothing to be gained from it.

The Pentagon has also been waging unlimited information warfare against the White House, trying to force Obama to back their desire to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s leak of his Afghanistan assessment to Bob Woodard and his Newsweek, 60 Minutes and The New York Times Magazine infomercials earned him a permanent transfer to civilian command, but he’s still on the job. That Mullen and “King David” Petraeus backed McChrystal’s campaign tells you that the top brass in the Pentagon are out of control.

The latest media sneeze says Obama has narrowed his decision on Afghanistan to four options, the most likely candidate being a surge of 34,000 troops. The other three options are “different mixes” of that one.

The best option is one suggested by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad and somewhat supported by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker: that we are negotiating with the closest thing to stable power institutions in the region, Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to find a way out of Afghanistan altogether. That sounds too good to be true. We can’t be doing something that smart.

Dick Cheney cabin boy and national security adviser John Hannah argues in Foreign Policy magazine that we haven’t been “adrift” in Afghanistan for eight years. Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s a great guy. Everything that’s gone wrong has been NATO’s fault, and the Pakistanis’ fault, and the absence of Hannah’s neocon pal Zalmay Kahlilzad as Karzai’s mentor. How full of beans can these guys get?

The New York Times reports that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan.

But National Security Director James Jones cautions that Obama hasn’t made up his mind yet.

It sounds like the White House is fed up with Karzai. In a Nov. 9 interview with ABC, Obama said he was seeking “provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now.” Yikes. If we’re blowing off Karzai altogether, we’re essentially denying Afghanistan’s existence as a sovereign nation. And if we’re really negotiating directly with the Pakistani military, we’ve pretty much negated that country’s sovereignty too.

Things are going to get mighty complicated if we have to set up separate diplomatic missions for every warlord and tribal elder in that part of the world.

On a brighter note, fertilizer bombs are now the most lethal weapon being used against U.S. and NATO forces. In a pair of raids on Nov. 8 Afghan police and U.S. soldiers seized a half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate, which is enough to make a crud-load of bombs. Ammonium nitrate is illegal in Afghanistan. Most of the ammonium nitrate found in Afghanistan is believed to have come from Pakistan. I reckon we’ll need to talk to the Pakistani military about that too.

This year 6,500 bombs have been found or have exploded. That’s a lot of bombs. 70 percent of those killed or wounded by the bombs are Afghans.

This is a wacky war we’re about to bury ourselves even deeper into, and it’s going to get wackier.

I’m not sure what we’re doing there. We’re not going to disrupt al-Qaeda by occupying a country al-Qaeda’s not in. It looks like we’ve given up trying to get Afghanistan and Pakistan to act like real countries, and while NATO has encouraged us to send more troops to Afghanistan, none of the NATO nations are likely to pony up any more. Opinion polls in Europe show that everybody wants to bring their troops home. The American public’s opposition the Afghanistan war is at an all time high. We don’t have a good reason to fight this war, nobody wants to fight it any more, and the Afghans don’t like us and the bad guys are killing us with fertilizer.

So heck, why not send more troops over there?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Trash Can Afghanistan

National Security Adviser James Jones says, "Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false." That’s maybe good news. It maybe means Obama is coming to his senses and is ready to pull the plug on this Af-Pak madness.

Various reports indicated that Obama was ready to go along with a re-re-re-escalation of up to 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but Jones says that’s bunk-ola. "[President Obama] has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources," says Jones. "Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources."

I guess that’s that. Jones isn’t a joke smith, one hears.

Some reports indicate that we’ve cut dope deals with the Pakistani military and its intelligence service to cut further dope deals with the Taliban for us and give us a face-saving way to skedaddle out of Afghanistan. I hope that there’s something to that.

Gen. Stan McChrystal’s scheme to mount a full-bull counterinsurgency in Afghanistan could only have come from someone as sleep deprived as he claims to be with the help of neocon maniacs like David Kilcullen and Fred Kagan. Based on the half-heinied strategy the Obama team came up with last March, we were going to disrupt al-Qaeda by occupying a country it wasn’t in any more, turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into real nations, and get the rest of the world to help us do it. It took mere months for team Obama to figure out that wasn’t going to work.

The much ballyhooed “deliberative process” the Obama administration is supposedly taking to coming up with a decision on Afghanistan is bull. Nobody needs to put a thousand staffers and the whole National Security Council, which is a bigger waste of government oxygen than the Joint Chiefs of Staff are, through a ringer and a rinse cycle to figure out the best course of action in Afghanistan. Winos in Uptown Chicago know our best course of action is to get the heck out of that tar pit.

Obama would have to be crazier than Caligula was to follow McChrystal’s megalomaniacal counterinsurgency scheme. Try to make the Afghans believe Hamid Karzai’s regime is legitimate? We’d be better served trying to turn lead into gold. Karzai’s a crooked jerk.

Reading tealeaves is an iffy business. Here’s what I’d like to think, though.

I’d like to think that Obama knows he poked the pup when he said Afghanistan was a “war of necessity.” I’d like to think he knows that he needs, at some point in the very near future, to have a sword fight with his out-of-control Pentagon.

The Pentagon, committed to make its Long War as long as it can make it, has spent $2.7 billion over the last three years on military construction in Afghanistan and plans to spend much more. It has granted a contract to a consulting firm for linguistics support in Afghanistan that has an estimated completion date of 2014.

The Jones decree aside, one continues to hear that Obama will settle on a “McChrystal Light” plan, one that gives Gen. Stanley McChrystal something short of the 40,000 troops he deems a minimum required to avoid mission failure. Unnamed senior administration officials say these reports are false, and are being leaked by Pentagon sources who are “trying to force a certain outcome."

We have a serious problem in this country, one that eclipses our economic and health care woes. Our military, and its supporters in Congress and industry, have virtually taken over our government. The open defiance of civilian rule, as illustrated by McChrystal’s blatant media campaign against the White House that has been endorsed by Gen. David Petraeus, Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. George Casey, is untenable. I am ashamed of these men. If they ever had moral compasses, they have lost them. They are turning the United States of America into a banana republic. We’re little different, at this point, than Pakistan, which is owned and operated by its military and its intelligence agency.

Our military has gotten so far out of hand, in fact, that a Pentagon purge is demanded. Everybody in a position of power in the Department of Defense these days is a David Petraeus disciple, or at least pretends to be, and Petraeus is the most dangerous general we’ve had since Douglas MacArthur, who took credit for Adm. Chester Nimitz’s victory in the Pacific during World War II then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Korea by goading the Chinese into the war.

As I’ve recommended before, Obama needs to demand the retirement or resignation letter of everyone in the Department of Defense who is a bird colonel or higher or whose job title includes the word “secretary.” Damn the torpedoes, Barry. You probably won’t see a second term anyway, so do the right thing with the one you have now. Toss these tinhorns in the trash.

Save our country from our militarists. Obama. Biden. Jones. Somebody. Anybody. Please.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Juntas in Wonderland

A pair of recent stories by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad suggested that Hillary Clinton had cut a big league dope deal with Pakistan’s military and intelligence services to negotiate with the Taliban and give the U.S. a face-saving path to exit Afghanistan. The story was difficult to believe, except for the fact that it made so much sense.

Getting out of Afghanistan is in our national interest. It is not a threat to us and al-Qaeda beat feet out of there a long time ago. We’re reasonably sure that what little is left of Osama bin Laden’s crowd is roaming around in Pakistan, and the real power in Pakistan is the military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So why not strike at the heart of the problem with the real center of gravity in the region?

According to Shahzad, Pakistani army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kyani and the director general of ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, snagged Hillary into a corner during her recent trip to Pakistan and told her what’s what. As Shahzad tells it, that led to the US telling Hamid Karzai rival Abdullah Abdullah to go dangle himself and convincing the Indians to remove its troops from Kashmir so the Pakistanis could focus their efforts against the Taliban in SWAT Valley.

That all sounds remarkable until you take a look at a new story in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, who says that “current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that [Obama’s] Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military.” Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.

The $7.5 billion aid package we’re throwing Pakistan’s way is seen, according to Hersh, “as strengthening [Pakistani President] Zardari at the expense of the military.”

One has to pause: we are currently experiencing a velvet coup ourselves. Gen. Stan McChrystal’s recent media campaign to force President Barack Obama into escalating the war in Afghanistan illustrates how subservient our civilian government is to the military it supposedly controls.

If Shahzad’s story is in the ballpark of truth, as Hersh’s story suggests that it is, we may be seeing the dawn of a new age of realism in American foreign policy, one that’s been a long time in coming.

It’s high time that the United States quits believing it can dictate political behavior to the rest of the world. We got spoiled by World War II, became deluded into thinking we could control the world through sheer military might. The events subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and especially after 9/11, should have taught us otherwise, though the neoconservative cabal will never admit that. The truth is that our military dominance, unmatched and unprecedented in human history, is next to worthless in terms of accomplishing our aims. Our airport security employees contribute more to national security than the hundreds of thousands of troops we have put in harm’s way overseas. That’s a harsh comment, I know, but it’s the truth. Our reckless foreign misadventures have been a counterproductive, sinful waste of national blood and treasure. Nobody wants our candy bars or soccer balls. They want us to leave them alone.

Our counterinsurgency doctrine is a sham. It’s based on the principle of bribing people not to shoot us with the guns we give them. We’d be better off if we (a) didn’t give them guns in the first place and (b) weren’t there to get shot at in the first place so (c) we wouldn’t need to bother to bribe them not to shoot at us with the guns we gave the if we weren’t there in the first place and didn’t give them any guns.

Hersh reports that there is a “very close” relationship between Mullen and his Pakistani counterpart Kayani. Hersh’s piece mostly addresses Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and how next to impossible it would be for evildoers to take it over and launch multi-megaton rocket whoppers at anybody. I’m pretty sure nobody really thinks that could happen. What’s important in the Hersh piece is what he has to say about the Pakistani military’s role in the power hierarchy.

“Some military men who know Pakistan well believe that, whatever the officer corps’s personal views, the Pakistan Army remains reliable.” Hersh wrote. “They cannot be described as pro-American, but this doesn’t mean they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on. Brian Cloughley, who served six years as Australia’s defense attaché to Pakistan and is now a contributor to Jane’s Sentinel, told me, ‘The chance of mutiny is slim.’”

Yet it appears we’re putting our chips on Pakistan’s military, and not its government, and it seems that the Pakistanis know what we’re looking for. A “senior Pakistani official” with “close ties to Zardari” told Hersh the Pakistan’s nuclear weapons “are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

A respectable way out of Afghanistan will be difficult to navigate, as a military mutiny has, for all practical purposes, already occurred in America. “King David” Petraeus’s Long War mob, which includes Gen. Ray Odierno, Mullen and McChrystal, and to a lesser extent, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is more of a bureaucratic twit than militaristic fanatic, has put a full court media press on Obama to bump up the bet on their Afghanistan adventure.

Obama needs a way to gracefully bow out of his position that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.” It’s nothing of the sort, of course. Few of our wars have been necessary. At this point in our national evolution, no war is necessary. We are the champions. We can stop fighting—if we can only put a muzzle on our military.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Blazing Afghanistan

Afghanistan has become a Mel Brooks movie.

President Hamid Karzai handpicked an election commission that threw the election his way. UN overseers declared the election was crooked and decreed that a runoff was required. Karzai didn’t want to face a runoff, but John Kerry and other U.S. officials talked him into accepting it.

Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, demanded that the crooked Karzai change the crooked election officials before the runoff and Karzai refused. So Abdullah refused to participate in the runoff and Karzai’s handpicked election officials cancelled the runoff and declared Karzai the winner. The U.S. and other western powers swarmed to decree Karzai Afghanistan’s “legitimate” president.

U.S. President Barack Obama said that it is time for a “new chapter” in Afghanistan’s history, “based on improved governance, a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption,” and more joint training of Afghan forces “so the Afghan people can provide for their own security.”

Then the corrupt Karzai government Afghanistan government rejected UN criticism of its corruption. The Foreign Ministry says criticism from the international community violates "respect for Afghanistan's national sovereignty."

What a crock of bull feathers. Afghanistan is an occupied country. Nobody respects its national sovereignty.

Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad reports that a big league dope deal went down between Hillary Clinton and the Pakistani military and intelligence dudes in which the Pakistani military and intelligence dudes offered to broker a deal with the Taliban. In exchange, according to Shahzad, Hillary agreed to blow off Hamid Karzai opponent Abdullah Abdullah and somehow talked the Indians into removing troops from the Kashmir region so the Pakistanis could focus on pounding the Taliban in the SWAT Valley. This supposedly will give us a graceful way of bowing out of our AfPak troop commitment. That’s an incredible tale that has a gnat’s antler’s chance of being true.

We’ve been fed leaks that President Obama is maybe going to go along with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s demand for more troops, but a hot-off-the-presses story from Germany’s Der Spiegel indicates maybe otherwise. US National Security Adviser James Jones expressed decided skepticism toward McChrystal’s agenda. “Generals always ask for more troops,” Jones said, “Take it from me.”

With regard to Afghanistan Jones said, “You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and the country will swallow them up as it has done in the past.” This bodes well for the decision process that is taking place in the White House. It suggests that Obama may not let the Pentagon steamroll him the way it steamrolled Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.

The Shazhad story sounds crazy, but it’s crazy enough to make sense.

If one assumes that the White House has changed its mind vis-à-vis Afghanistan—that Obama has come to his senses and realizes the Afghanistan conflict is not a “war of necessity”—then it would take a dollop of skullduggery to skulk out of it.

The Jones interview with Der Spiegel is unlikely to be a chance media encounter. Jones has kept his cards close to his chest throughout his tenure as National Security Adviser. What little he’s said about the AfPak situation has been anti-hysterical. In early October, he told CNN "I don't foresee the return of the Taliban, And I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in danger—imminent danger—of falling."

That was in clear contrast of the falling sky picture of Afghanistan that McChrystal and his supporters have been painting. (We need more troops now, now, now or all will be lost. Pish.)

Rumors abound. McClatchy reports that Obama is leaning toward sending 34,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That’s a lot fewer troops that the 80,000 McChrystal supposedly has asked for as his “low risk” option, but it’s still 34,000 troops too many.

Any effort at conducting counterinsurgency in support of the Karzai regime will be a farce. No matter how much lipstick the Obama administration tries to smear on him, Karzai has been exposed as a tinhorn slob who has family ties to CIA payoffs and the Afghan drug trade. Putting one more G.I. in harm’s way to back Karzai would be a national disgrace, and pouring one more penny on national treasure into Afghanistan would be asinine.

Obama should forget about his second term. He needs to do the right thing now. There’s no “winning” in Afghanistan. Sending a half-million troops there won’t accomplish what McChrystal’s after, a nation birthing project that will bring Afghanistan from the middle ages to the 21^st century sometime around the dawn of the 22^nd century. Escalating the war in Afghanistan would be the worst possible course of action our nation has ever taken, even worse than our foolish entanglement in World War I.

Our best move, by far, would be to follow the course of action Shahzad suggests we may be taking: bribe Pakistan’s military and intelligence service into negotiating with the Taliban and hunting down what little is left of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, and bringing our troops home. That’s not a pretty solution, but it’s the best one available, and sometimes you have to let reality have its way.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.