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 a big stink between Russia and Georgia lately, which is to say Russia is doing what it wants and Georgia is complaining to NATO.

The latest from Reuters:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war “very close”, a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday.

Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the “foreign minister” of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.

“We literally have to avert war,” Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels.

Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: “Very close, because we know Russians very well.”

To start with, Georgia does not go to war against Russia in the same sense that Junior’s pee-wee team does not play football against the New York Giants. Whatever its failings, during the 90s, Vladimir Putin’s reign as president (which ends today) saw the resurgence of the Russian military. The Russians have a military tradition a bit beyond extraordinary, they lost 3 million people in the first World War, then fought a long, bloody civil war, to the tune of 9 million, then lost 20 million people in the second World War and still weren’t giving an inch when the U.S. forces in Europe thought they’d be a push over. When you put 32 million people into the meat grinder in half a century while standing firm on the mat you get your hardcore military culture bona fides. Then to spike the ball, you release a picture of a guy doing this:

and the Ballgunner is really willing to concede that his manhood is measured in fractions, possibly even fractions with decimals.

When you take this and put it against the Georgians, whose military consists of, uh……… Well you get the point. The Georgian military is defensive oriented, but defensive against other military power houses like Azerbaijan, Armenia or possibly the dreaded Ossetians. Georgia vs Russia would not look even remotely like a fight. The Russians tried the touchy feely stuff in Chechnya, and got embarrassed. Then, someone on the command staff realized they had been reading from the American book, they took a big swig of vodka, proclaimed Мы Русский! and put the hammer down. Do you hear of any problems from Chechnya?

When you consider that every country in the former Soviet sphere is chock full of Russian intelligence agents throughout the government and the military, there arises the even more delightful scenario that Georgia might try to assemble the military only to find half of them already lined up on the other side.

In a lot of ways this is really fun to watch. Russia was warning the west to leave Serbia alone in the Kosovo matter. But in a monument to hardheadedness, NATO got involved in the Orthodox/Catholic/Muslim debacle that predates every standing government in the world and will still be raging when NATO is listed next to League of Nations and Chechnya in the book of “Ooops!” But the U.S. signed off on Kosovo by playing the ethnicity card, oblivious to the fact that the “area” of Kosovo is about as Serbian as Bunker Hill is American. Now, the Russians are saying, “Look! The poor Abkhazians are ethnically distinct from the Georgians, they should have their own country too! It’s even better that they want their country to join our country!” I’m sure it has nothing to do with those lovely Black Sea shipping lanes that are up for grabs (not that Russia doesn’t already have some, but you can never have too many ports.)

Now, the west really looks silly. They can try the, “No, no. That’s not fair,” routine and wind up looking like hypocrites. Or they can throw Georgia under the bus, at which point an alliance with NATO will be shown as worth less than a big pile of doody. Meanwhile, Russia gets to sit back, enjoy the show and ponder their next move. What about those large Russian populations in the Baltic nations? What about the divided population in Ukraine? There are opportunities aplenty for Russia to thank NATO, the E.U. and the U.S. for stomping on its toes for the last few years.

We’re reminded of one of those people from long ago, when folks seemed to know what they were talking about. That someone was Otto von Bismark, who left us this: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”

The chief chair-warmer in the White House is getting spun up for the big NATO conference in Bucharest, Romania, and the event is already interesting to nerds like me. The main event, is Bush going head to head with the two powerhouses of Europe, France and Germany, over NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, and Russia has made it very, very clear that this is not an option that would behoove anyone.

White House press secretary Dana Perino, has espoused what is either boat loads of moxie or thundering ignorance by saying , “The last time we checked, Russia didn’t get a vote. And this is a NATO discussion, a NATO exercise, and it will be a NATO decision.”

This blithe little statement is nothing short of the White House saying to Russia and West Europe, “Let’s you and him fight.” America might be more or less insulated and isolated from the geopolitics in Europe, but France and Germany don’t have that claim. It gets bloody cold up on that fertile plain, and a whole lot of Russian fuel goes into heating German and French homes.

Russia is also likely hedging bets that Europe wouldn’t like to see the simmering conflict in Serbia and the faux-state of Kosovo blow up. Kosovo, being primarily Muslim, is really and truly an outlier in the European world, which for the last long stretch of history has been divided into Orthodox (east) and Catholic/protestant (west). Russia has the gasoline to pour on the Orthodox fires in Serbia, and given the general instability that lingers in the Balkans, no one is willing to write off a reignition of the ethnic fires of the 1990s.

This dolts at the cable news, of course, are missing the broader picture here. Bush is making an unprecedented attempt to redraw the political lines of Europe, and his failure or success is going to be important for generations.

    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.

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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.