If you own a computer, a TV or a radio you’ve heard about the assault that killed 9 U.S. soldiers and wounded 15 in Afghanistan. It doesn’t take a dynamo like the Ball Gunner to point out that things do not appear to be going well in the mountain lands.

Whatever brain trust operates in the State Department feeding whatever passes for human intelligence to Defense these days continues to look like a clumsy, fat kid trying to swat a fly. It’s all flailing and flopping and chubby arms waving all over the place.

“We just don’t get it. They’re coming from Pakistan, but we aren’t at war with Pakistan. Why do they keep coming? What is going on? Who am I? Why am I wearing this dress?”

Since the books of grand military failure are always chronically unpopular (as opposed to books of stirring success which fly off the shelves) the answer remains shrouded in mystery except to us grand cynics who realize that the nation-state model is a grand ruse of modern living. The solution, so evasive to the PhDs, is that the Pashtun, the ones we are currently fighting, don’t known and don’t particularly care about state boundaries and national sovereignty.

On this mountain, they are Pashtun. On that mountain over there, they are Pashtun, too. That a cartographer in London decided that this mountain is Afghanistan and that mountain is Pakistan is not relevant. What is relevant to the Pashtun is the Pashtun. 

This, of course, doesn’t preclude fighting among the Pashtun tribes, which the Pashtun do with aplomb. The Gilzai Pashtun, for instance, love to go to war against the Durrani Pashtun. As luck would have it, the Gilzai have a golden opportunity to fight the Durrani by fighting against president Hamid Karzai and the largely Durrani government.

All this crazy tribalism is a tough sell, end even über geeks like the Ball Gunner can’t really wrap their heads around it. But all you really need to figure out is that Afghanistan is one of the toughest places on the globe to eek out a living. The people that do it are some tough bastards, and when resources like food, shelter and habitable land are in short supply you had best be ready with a big stick when someone tries to shove you off of yours.

When it’s an all in or all out sort of game - with staying alive as the take-home, it forges some pretty tight knit and wild groups. Taking a look at just the various tribes, sub-tribes and sub-subtribes of the Pashtun ethnic group is like reading like the spreadsheet from hell, and you’ve not even factored in a half-dozen other groups from Tajiks, to Uzbeks, pseudo-Iranians, people left over from 30 failed invasions of Afghanistan through out several thousand years of history; it’s like a big party of multi-culturalism with everybody either oppressing or alternately being oppressed by somebody else. Go to certain areas of Afghanistan and you might find definitely non-regional traits like blond hair and blue eyes.

The real joke is that despite all the quips about barbarism and how wonderfully advanced “us folks over yonder in ‘Merica is” a good swath of the uneducated Afghan hillbillies are bi- or tri-lingual (even if they are illiterate.) So the next time the chest-thumpers gripe about how their children “aint never gunna learn them no Spanish” kindly remind them that hicks in the “uncivilized” part of the world know three languages, most of which aren’t even from the same language family.

So that’s the short answer for ongoing problems in Afghanistan. The U.S., like the Russians, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Romans and a long line of others are learning that when the cards hit the table the Afghan tribes stick with the Afghan tribes. They might tolerate you, feed you, wave when you go by, they might even like you. But if you expect the loyalty of the Gilzai to point anywhere but the Gilzai then you’re obviously thinking in terms of West Europe rather than Central Asia.

At the end of the day, the U.S. is appearing more and more to have somehow found itself on the wrong side of the fight in Afghanistan. Whatever the intentions going in, we’re now fighting the absolutely last people on the world you want to fight in the last place in the world you want to fight them.

There’s been all sorts of stuff just begging to be ballgunned (TM) lately. I won’t play catch up, if you read the Ball Gunner then you’re obviously a person of refining cast among the common rabble. Congratulations.

But I simply can’t pass up what is currently happening in Afghanistan. It has sneezed rigor on to these arthritic bones of mine. Plastered across Fox News even as I type is “NATO and Afghan troops to take back villages from the Taliban.” I doubt Taliban commander Mohammed Omar himself could have picked a better line to set the stage for what’s coming.

What the gulls in Washington haven’t figured out is that the front has shifted from Iraq back to Afghanistan. Iraq is done for by any and all estimates. The hapless goobers in the big media have snuggled up to the “security gains” of late, except nobody has really let slip the slimy truth that we are paying all sides to play nice and behave for awhile. No one is asking, because once that question gets asked someone is just going to be FORCED to ask, “Well, what are they spending the money on?” and the short answer is that they are making down payments on dead Americans, collaborators and rivals with our own money. The British financed their own defeat in Afghanistan long back when Kipling was writing about it. Now, we’re doing the same in Iraq.

But since we’re feeding our own flames in Iraq, the folks we’re fighting, the ones we still believe are some clueless ‘tards with an AK and an RPG, are shifting funding, logistics and operations to Afghanistan. The story is that the Taliban has “seized” a bunch of small towns around Kandahar, the Ball Gunners speculation is that there wasn’t any “seizing” like when the Germans “seized” Stalingrad (however briefly) or the French “seized” Dien Bien Phu. These sorts of “seizings” imply that you fought your way in, I’d imply the Pashtun “seizing” the area around Kandahar is more like Raiders fans “seizing” the Oakland Colliseum, except that the Pashtun have fewer guns and are better mannered.

Simply put, you can’t seize something that’s yours to begin with. This is something the U.S. grapples with - you can’t liberate a place from the people who live there. After the liberators are gone the people are still there, except now they hate you.

Speaking of things the U.S. grapples with, how about diversity? The Afghan army is held up as a model of people from different tribal regions and groups and ethnicities palling around like they’re the A-Team. Which is great, and gets you about 5 feet outside the military base before it breaks up. What it means for current operations can be pretty well summed up.

I. An army full of Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks and a half dozen other groups is going to be sent into the heart of Pashtun country to fight. 

For settling down a region, this strategy would rank right up with sending in the Klan to calm down the L.A. street riots. Which is to say, it will not only not work, it will probably fail spectacularly.
Even assuming the combined armies manages to pacify the area you still don’t get past your first stumbling block - the people you’ve liberated are still there, except now they hate you. You’ve shown the Pashtun that you’re on the side of the people they’ve been fighting since long before the U.S. was even a feeble idea. You’ve shown a proud people that you’re going to make them subservient to others. You’ve, in essence, rammed hell down their throats.

Trying to do anything in Afghanistan has historically been shown to be a pretty pointless venture. Everyone from the Soviets to Alexander can attest to the fact that once you enter that realm everything you know about how people organize and function rewinds about a thousand years. But the one rule, the BIIIIIIG thing you JUST. DON’T. FORGET. is that once you alienate the Pashtun your options are limited to 1) retreat  or 2) a repeat of General Elphinstone’s disaster.

Summer sure got hot early.

    I’d imagine the booze joints around the Pentagon are doing a pretty brisk business over the last few days. There seem to be a lot of ropes unraveling at the same time, and the rabbit-hole we’re dangling over is looking deep and dark and probably not a wonderland at the bottom.

Pakistan’s recent elections have all the appearance of near total annihilation of Musharraf’s Muslim-League Q- party. The general displeasure of Pakistanis toward the ruling party, seen largely as an American puppet, is hardly a shock, and the American refusal to denounce November’s crackdowns and the bloody siege of the Red Mosque worked overtime to undermine the pillars of Washington support in the country. But the magnitude of the loss must be reverberating through the halls of U.S. foreign policy makers.

Via the New York Times 

  From unofficial results the private news channel, Aaj Television, forecast that the Pakistan Peoples Party would win 110 seats in the 272-seat National Assembly, with Mr. Sharif’s party taking 100 seats.

Mr. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, was crushed, holding on to just 20 to 30 seats. Early results released by the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, also showed the Pakistan Peoples Party to be leading in the number of seats won.

Already rumors are circulating about Musharraf’s resignation, meaning the U.S. might be about to lose one of it’s allies in the region. The U.S. still has substantial influence given the amount of aid that flows into Pakistan. But the incoming parties will not have the same enthusiasm in dealing with the U.S. as the State department is accustomed  to. The new Pakistani government will be in the position to make some demands of their own, especially given the importance of Pakistan’s tribal regions.

Put bluntly, the U.S. cannot succeed in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s help in the border region. Nor can the U.S. act unilaterally within Pakistan without risking regional destabilization. The new Pakistani parliament will be more than willing to play hardball, complete with the knowledge that a good number of the people who elected them would like to see the U.S. fail in Afghanistan.

___________________________________________________
Things have also been complicated by recent announcement of independence from Kosovo. The following days and weeks will be ones of rather loud discomfiture between NATO, which largely supports independence, and Russia, that has sided with Serbia in rejecting the declaration.

There are plenty of other European nations who are worried that a European Union recognition of Kosovo would rekindle other internal nationalist movements. Any member of the European Union can kill an official recognition, since such an act requires consensus. Given Spain, Greece, Romania and Slovakia are all facing similar issues, the odds of consensus seem slim.

Similarly, Russia will kill any United Nations measures toward recognition. This will put Kosovo in an odd sort of limbo, recognized by individual states but not by the international bodies.

Already, there are reports of violence breaking out in the region. While NATO and UN forces are present, it is not clear to what extent they are willing to serve as peace keepers or peace makers. More importantly, this comes at a time of increased tensions between Russia and NATO.

Russia has voiced opposition to this plan from the start and now appears to have egg on its face. A new Russian president will be elected on March 2, and baring some intergalactic anomaly, that president will be Dimitry Medvedev. His presidency will begin with humiliation if Russia doesn’t respond.  If the EU cannot come to a consensus as to Kosovo, the U.S. will be left alone in a staring match against the resurging Russians. The field is complicated by the addition of China,  ever aware of it’s own nationalist-separatist movements, who is siding with Serbia and Russia.

The developments in Pakistan are going to affect how the military does business in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and developments in Kosovo are going to shape NATO and European Union relations for years. The U.S. has had the privilege of unopposed decision making for several years, due to the weakness of other powers and the strength of its alliances. How Washington and the Pentagon handle a return to parity will be interesting to watch.

There is a lengthy McClatchy story about the ongoing “insurgency” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a mix of reasonable journalism and unexciting hatchet job. I encourage you to look for yourself.

Western media does a bad job when it comes to defining conflicts. Western government press agents are culpable in this as well, but I suspect this might be partly by design. By and large, the conflict in Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree, Iraq, have ceased to be insurgencies and devolved into complicated civil wars. Because the civil war is waged largely with guerrilla tactics people default to an assumption that we are fighting an insurgency.

This is unhealthy for two reasons: First, labeling the opposition as “insurgents” allows us to underestimate them as a meager handful of hillbillies that we could mop up with one well placed bomb. Second, it lets us think that we are fighting an “insurgency” because that is all the bad guys can muster.

In reality, our opposition in Afghanistan have taken a play from Mao Zedong’s book. The Chinese civil war was largely put on hold to fight Imperial Japan during World War 2. While Mao’s communists would occasionally join Chiang Kai-Chek’s forces to engage the Japanese, they also used the distraction of the superior military forces to snatch the countryside out from under the ruling government’s nose. Once World War 2 concluded, Chiang’s government found itself holed up in isolated urban pockets. All that was left for Mao was to patiently grow his forces while Chiang’s withered.

Westerns have a hard time wrapping their minds about this. In our world, if you control Berlin, Paris or Washington then you’ve got the reigns of Germany, France or the U.S.  Once you get into the wild lands, these rules no longer need apply. What NATO is grappling with is the fact that once you have Kabul, you control, in totality, Kabul. Taking Kabul was the easy part, getting all of Afghanistan to look toward Kabul for guidance would be a historical first.

When the Associated Press publishes things like “Study: Afghanistan Could Fail as a State” I’m left wondering why people pay them as much as they do. Afghanistan as a failed state is about as newsworthy as a sunrise. Draw a time line of Afghan history, pin it on the wall and throw a dart and you’ll either hit failed narco-state or weak theocracy.

An independent study co-chaired by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones and former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering offered the usual pile of recommendations, including -

…increase NATO force levels and military equipment sent to Afghanistan, decouple U.S. management of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, establish a special envoy to coordinate all U.S. policy on Afghanistan, and champion a unified strategy among partner nations to stabilize the country in five years.

One of the biggest failings of NATO and NATO countries is the assumption that all countries can be “NATO-fied” with the appropriate leverage of military and economic forces. The fact this approach does not work, like ever, is no impediment to trying it again. Fans of this approach like to point to NAZI Germany or Imperial Japan as evidence, either oblivious or intentionally ignoring that these were traditionally progressive countries that experienced a historically anomalous bit of despotism. Most of our nation-building efforts involve historically despotic countries, and there lies the rub.

Kabul is not Berlin of the 1940s, and pretending we can Marshall Plan it into Jeffersonian democracy is naïve. Finding a strongman to run the country is probably our best shot. Establishing a reasonably pro-western government that will keep the schools open and the extremists away would be worth the effort. Trying to go from theocratic despotism to Federalism in 10 years is not.

The Los Angeles Times has published one of the shoddiest editorials I’ve ever read about Afghanistan. It’s pretty bleak in there, and you might want to shield your eyes, but if you’re feeling intrepid you can find the greasy monster here.

“By every measure, the war in Afghanistan is going badly, and NATO is showing the strains.”

I was advised, long ago, to not make statements about “everybody” or “everything” because these statements are really just patently untrue. When you open your editorial with needless hyperbole I’m automatically going to front you all the credibility of a Garfield cartoon.

“That’s because most of the NATO countries don’t want to fight — they believe they signed up for peacekeeping duty, not a “hot war” — and the rest have battle fatigue. The latest casualty is Canada, where antiwar sentiment threatens to bring down the government.”

Following the news is something I do. It’s, you know, my job. But I’ve obviously been watching the wrong channels or maybe surfing the wrong Webs, because these angry hordes laying siege to Ottawa have somehow escaped my attention.

“A high-level panel has recommended that the (Canadian) government insist on the deployment of at least 1,000 combat troops from another country (presumably the United States) to the free-fire zone in southern Afghanistan … Expect a showdown at the next NATO summit in Bucharest in April.”

A free-fire zone? Truly? Considering that there have been more murders in Los Angeles than TOTAL coalition deaths in all of Afghanistan this year, I can only imagine that southern California is some nightmarish Mad Max war zone where grizzled veterans prey on the peasants, rape the livestock and drive off the women.

“To keep NATO from disintegrating, the U.S. must accept that it will have to do more of the military heavy lifting and allow Canada and Britain to do less. In return, Washington should increase its efforts to persuade its partners to spend far more on grass-roots economic, political and infrastructure development.”

Gimme a break. Saying the U.S. is going to do the heavy lifting in NATO is about as radical as saying the sun will rise in the morning.

Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that U.S. policy if Afghanistan has been ham-fisted at times. When you’re surprised that Afghanistan is selling opium it’s pretty obvious that you skipped history. There’s a lot to be said about what we could be doing better, but don’t try to talk to me about problems in the region if you can’t even slip “Pashtun” into a sentence to sound smart.