As for Georgia, we’re clearly in lunatic territory now. Russia or no Russia, the Caucasus nations’ borders have always been more or less a form of interpretive dance. As in, I’m going to dance over here with some guns and then the border goes this way. John McCain, George Bush and Barack Obama all support wrapping Georgia up in the NATO blanket. This despite the fact that Mikheil Saakashvili is a close contender for best tin-pot thug of 2007, after he called in the police to dispatch anti-government protests and shut down opposition TV station IMEDI. So even if you get past the point of allowing an unstable nation into NATO, you still have the rather prickly problem that:

• Saakashvili started a war
• Russia countered
• If Georgia was a NATO nation then the U.S. and western Europe would have been REQUIRED to assist them

That’s kind of the point people seem to miss, once you’re a NATO nation the gist of the matter is that you don’t have to do this stuff alone any more. If Georgia had been a NATO member back in August then the U.S. would be fighting a third war, and a much worse war, and very likely a world war, this very moment. It’s true that the Russian military at this point isn’t all it pretends to be, but there are long lines of bones from Moscow to Paris and then Volgagrad (was Stalingrad) to Berlin. Being that neither George Bush, nor Barack Obama, nor John McCain would be doing the freezing amid General Winter and General Mud I suppose these things are of little consequence to them.

Opening up NATO to these two, not entirely stable, nations is asking for nothing but trouble. Of course, its total exposure as a poor idea undoubtedly means it will be pursued with gusto. Like William Lind, I occasionally wish we had only one monarch for several decades, there would be a greater chance of talking sense into them.

On a humerous note that will fly over the heads of most, Russia apparently thinks the U.S. really should stay in Iraq a bit longer.

From other fronts:

The looming disaster in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region rapidly is decending into a comedy of errors. The lack of a unified strategy means a hodge-podge of actions that only push forward in one area by pushing back in another. But the combined might of Generals Larry, Curly and Moe have decided that arming the tribal militias in Pakistan (free registration required) is the solution du jure. While this is billed as a Pakistani solution, the reality is that this is likely a U.S. solution handed to the Pakistanis.

First, if the problem in the area is a LACK OF ACCESS to weapons then I’ve apparently been reading the wrong news.
Second, the reason this resoundingly fails the smell test is the desperate attempt to brand this as “Surge: Part Deux - Surge Harder” or whatever. Even the military has proclaimed the obvious, that attempting a surge type strategy in Afghanistan would be well beyond worthless. Iraqis, despite their religious divide and total willingness to kill the ever loving crap out of each other, DO have a common identity as Iraqis, with a shared language, common ethnicity, common lineage and the like. Afghans, on the other hand, don’t really havy any of that stuff. What they’ve got instead is a mash of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and half dozen smaller groups each trying to chisel out a small corner of the mountains and valleys to kick back with their wives and enjoy all the benefits the 18th century has to offer. Handing out weapons to the Pashtun in Pakistan is essentially the same as handing out weapons to the Pashtun in Afghanistan, and when the Pashtun in Afghanistan are not fighting foreigners they are quite content to spend their time fighting the Uzbeks and Tajiks. Just maybe the Uzbeks and Tajiks will resent being shot at by weapons provided by the U.S. / Pakistan. At least, I would.

But we’ve still got nothing but noise coming from the sound box in Washington. (from the Wa-Po article)

“There is a significant, but not a comprehensive, bump up in the security element,” one official said. While there are more soldiers on the ground, he said, the military strategy is not sustainable because Pakistan “is still doing virtually nothing about extending the government’s political authority into the tribal areas, and virtually nothing about economic development” in the region.

Of course they are “doing virtually nothing about extending government’s political authority into the tribal areas” you bleeding wanker! There has never been “political authority” in the tribal areas outside the tribes - get it, Gus? NEVER-NEVER-NEVER-NEVER-NEVER!!!!!!

Meanwhile, As Hamid Karzai and the Afghan state slide ever closer to the chasm of illegitimacy and irrelevance, NATO has stumbled upon the perfect solution - just pick some other poor schmoe to lead Afghanistan. Of course, the Afghans have plans of their own when it comes to governance. After being ingloriously runoff by the Northern Alliance, the Taliban are resurfacing as the de facto government in many regions.

As William Lind has noted, cutting a deal with the Taliban that returns them to power with the promise of keeping out Al Qaeda might be the best hope for Afghanistan.

Here’s hoping that the new silverback in the Oval Office is paying attention.

My dad (ostensibly the human one) likes to tell the story of taking me to Mandeville, Louisiana where his parents lived. Anyone that has been to Mandeville can tell you that bustling metropolis it aint, but it puts on good airs of being a real city with real city things in it.

At one point I asked if I could go outside to play. My dad said that was fine but to stay on the sidewalk. At that moment I looked up at him with my little five or six year old rube eyes and asked in all earnesty, “What’s a sidewalk?” The Ball Gunner has since, of course, learned what a sidewalk is (not that they build any in Panama City) in addition to mastering the further acoutrements of civil society: computers, automobiles, literacy, pants, all those fanciful things so mysterious to the little hick of yore.

What yon youthful woodsbilly Ball Gunner has to do with now is that the Pentagon, the war architects, the civilian planners, the money spenders, the wonks, snonks and bonks hurling us endlessly into the chasm of Central Asia do not know and make no pretense of learning that the various ethnic groups that compromise the ill-fitting region known as Afghanistan are just as oblivious to 21st century political boundaries as Wee Billy Ball Gunner was about pedestrian ones.

You’d have to be inordinately slack witted to think the Global War on Terrorism is going anything but resoundingly poorly at the moment. This weekend’s blast at a Marriott in Pakistan are solid evidence that whatever we might have done to the terrorist networks of Al Qaida, we haven’t taken away their ability to plan and carry out an operation that kills 53 people including two American troops.

There’s an old saying about if you sit a monkey at a typewriter for an infinite amount of time he (or she) will eventually reproduce a given text through sheer chance. We can only assume the current strategy in Central Asia was one of the unsuccessful monkey forays into grand literature. Really no part of it makes sense. The U.S., for instance, wants to woo the Pashtun in Afghanistan while waging war on them in Pakistan. Ball Gunners everywhere are scratching their heads at this one. The United States has put a man on the moon, but is apparently incapable of understanding that the Pashtun care less about the imaginary line separating Pakistan from Afghanistan than Ball Gunner Jr. knew about sidewalks.

I’d imagine if old Osama hisself designed the U.S. policy in Pakistan he could not come up with a better way for us to utterly flub the war on terror. The primary threat in Pakistan is not Al Qaeda, the Taliban or any other be-bearded horrors lurking in the corner, dangerous though they may be. The threat in Pakistan is legitimacy, and the U.S. is undermining the legitimacy of the Pakistani government faster that any terrorist organization ever could.

From the NY Times:

Pakistan’s President Calls for End to Terrorism and Criticizes Intervention by U.S.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Asif Ali Zardari addressed a joint session of Parliament on Saturday, his first speech there since his election two weeks ago, and offered a program of peace and reform while vowing to root out terrorism and extremism.

Mr. Zardari, who is seen as pro-American but is confronted by public hostility to American policy toward militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, said his government was determined to meet the challenge posed by terrorist and extremist elements in those areas.

His government would offer peace to anyone willing to renounce violence, and would invest in development and political reform of the border areas, but would use force as a last resort to those who challenged the authority of the government.

He declared that his government should be firm in its resolve not to allow terrorists to use Pakistani soil to carry out terrorist activities against any foreign country, and said he wanted to improve relations with two of Pakistan’s neighbors, Afghanistan and India.

But he also warned that Pakistan would not abide further American military incursions into the border areas. “We will not tolerate the violation of our sovereignty and territorial integrity by any power in the name of combating terrorism,” he said in a comment that was broadly greeted by legislators, who loudly thumped on their desks to show their support.

The recent collapse of the Pakistani coalition that brought Zardari to power is the last warning we are likely to get. No one seems to aware that the days of Musharraf shucking and jiving to Washington’s strings are now relegated to the good ole days. If we make any more efforts to sour this punch we may well find ourselves with not only a recalcitrant Pakistan but a hostile one. What that could ultimately mean is pretty murky. That the Pakistani military and intelligence services are compromised is so apparent that no one even tries to tart up the ugly truth. But when there are open reports of “Pakistani troops and tribesmen” firing on U.S. helicopters it’s pretty obvious that the wheels are coming loose from their screws.

We have no way of knowing where the tipping point will be and how far we can push before the entire Pakistani government comes crashing down like a Jenga game. But if we lose Pakistan we will certainly lose Afghanistan, a fate that may already be sealed, regardless.

On that note, the Intel Dump at the Wa Po has an interesting analysis about the raging drought in Afghanistan and what that means for the coming winter. Carter, of the Intel Dump, argues that the U.S. should begin preparations to provide food for the remote villages during the coming winter. What he neglects to note that if we do not the Taliban will make every effort to exert themselves in our absence. He does mention that these would be efforts on a similar scale to the heroic Berlin Airlift, and if you ask me, the chances of mustering that much political will in this nation are roughly zilcho.

I don’t know what flavor of sky pie they serve at CENTCOM that makes people believe blowing the Pashtun to bits in Pakistan and giving them Islam friendly meatpies in Afghanistan constitutes a winning strategy. But unless some strategic mana from heaven falls to the ground the U.S. is either going to be forced to create something resembling a unified strategy in the region or keep stoking the fire until the roof blows right off the contraption. A shooting war with Pakistan or a governmentless Pakistan would be a collassal failure. Alienating the Pashtun will mean defeat. The Pentagon’s refusal to move beyond World War 2 style military planning in the “kill things and break stuff” vein potentially will be viewed in history as the thing that wrecked American global power. As General Petaeus takes the reigns at CENTCOM it will be interesting to see if he takes counterinsurgency seriously or if all his bluster blows out. Afghanistan is not Iraq. Central Asia is not Arabia.

There have been two great failings of leadership in the Global War on Terror since Sept. 11 inaugurated the 21st century:

1) An expansion of the War on Terror to anything resembling hardline Islam regardless of its connections to terrorism. The Taliban never had wide-spread support among any groups, let alone Pashtun peasants. But adamantly connecting the Taliban with the Pashtun has birthed us slews of new enemies.
2) The often repeated belief that victory is inevitable causing us to continually underestimate our opponents.

We’re operating under the belief that the Central Asians are like us, that their experience and development and understanding of the world is like ours and that, deep down, they want to be like us. But connections in ancient peoples are deep. This was their land before we got there and will be likely long after we’re gone. There aren’t a whole lot of people throughout history that have gone to war for the arid high country. We can sit them down, tell them to play by our rules, make nice, solidify their political boundaries, and join hands for the love chain. And once we tell them that, our only likely response will be a very old language responding in a different variation that classic phrase summarizing unfamiliarity with what is expected:

“What’s a sidewalk?”

Behold:

The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007. The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al-Qaeda’s central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush’s term in office winds down, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials involved in the operations. 

That would be the Washington Post article, “In hunt for Bin Ladin, a new approach.”

There is nothing new here, the grasp of warfare in this post is as old as Napoleon and cold as his bones. Note the theme - that we can concentrate on the base in Pakistan and beat back the central command - presumably to Berlin or possibly Krakow. The article goes on to state that we are now looking for Bin Ladin by flying around in Predators and shooting the occasional missile with predictable results.

Apparently the Post writer and whoever ladeled out this story consider that the Pakistan-Afghan border is some tiny, irrelavant place and that with enough Predators and enough missiles we are bound to find him, you know, eventually. The premise of the article and of the strategy simply do not wash with reason or logic. It is what my grandfather referred to as “bottle-assing around” - ineffectually moving around in an attempt to look busy.

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Onward and upward.

The mighty darlings at the Heritage Foundation (oh how I love them) have served up yet another steaming platter of preposterous. You can find it in the ominously titled “The Return of History:  Confronting the Russian Bear after the Georgian War.” I think the better title would be, “Europe and Russia: lets you and him fight.”

It’s the same old tired story: that we need to like, TOTALLY invite the Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, and Russia is like so totally mean, and I just can’t believe what Vladimir Putin was wearing the other day. OMG LOL!

You can always tell when the apes are getting serious because they throw in the serious word du jure - geopolitical. Like so -  The Russian-Georgian war rocked the geopolitical landscape.
Well dear lord, we know they’re super serious now. The geopolitical landscape, you say. This calls for serious cat!

Heritage, as always, is chock full of good ideas: the Europeans should goad Russia into war, the Europeans should not have fuel to heat their home of cook their food this winter, the Europeans should make demands that Russia will never accept, the Europeans should militarize and then beef up their NATO presence which will be led by… take a guess who Heritage thinks NATO will be led by.  Come on, I dare you.

Jaded though I am, I will excuse Heritage as simply being utterly clueless. But it’s truly discouraging when supposedly educated people lend credence to this unadulterated nonsense.

In the month since the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Bush administration has crafted a policy that should please some liberal critics and upset conservative hard-liners — a low-key approach that tries to help the Georgians recover without backing Russia further into a corner. 

From my view in the cheap seats it hardly looks like Russis into any corner anywhere. Flush with money, flush with resources, increasing their influence and re-exerting themselves in the so called near-abroad - if they are in a corner it is one of the more spacious and luxuriant corners I have ever seen.

The world has changed dramatically in a few short years and America is refusing to point itself in the new direction. I know its pointless to get upset about things I can’t change, but we are talking about fundamentally failing to understand the big challenges of the modern world. Oh well.

We’ve got the Wa Po saying the Pentagon wants a long pause in post-surge drawdowns, at the same time Barack Obama is claiming the Surge “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” and without missing a beat we have “top military officials” saying we’re going to haul 7,000 troops out of Iraq early next year.

The long and short is that no one really has a clue what is happening, and nobody wants to make promises they’re likely going to be eating later. The Republicans really, really want to get some meat on the table before November to shore up their victory credentials. Given that one month and three days before the election the Shia government is going to take control of the Sunni Awakening Councils, there is probably a good amount of puckering going on over at the GOP campaign headquarters.

To make matters a bit worse, everyone watching Afghanistan can see things unraveling quickly. Hamid Karzai himself visited and appealed to a village that was hit by a U.S. led strike. There are variety of numbers out there, the U.S. said we got 30 bad guys and 7 civilians, the villagers and the United Nations say it was more like 90 people including 60 children. I’m inclined to believe the number is somewhere in between the two claims, but it still plays to the Afghans, who are increasingly able to castigate the U.S. as a technological goliath whom everyone should fight.

This is compounded by the fact that U.S. troops are now conducting cross-border raids into the tribal areas of Pakistan. Pakistani politicians realize things are at a boiling point right now and wisely negotiated a ceasefire during the holy month of Ramadan. The U.S. moving in with a contingent of Tajiks and Uzbeks to start shooting and bombing during that ceasefire could potentially blow the top off the situation. It goes without saying that Pakistani politics are currently at a dangerous level. The ruling coalition has collapsed and there are a lot of power struggles going on in a nation with nuclear weapons. If the U.S. comes across as a physical and not just moral and political aggressor against Pakistan we could easily find ourselves with a hostile government in Islamabad. There is always the possibility of putting in another tin pot to beat the country into submission, but the U.S. desperately needs an image as the arbiter of democracy to continue support for its current operations. 

The Ball Gunner, for one, is wondering what in tarnation is happening at Centcom that made them suddenly toss the counterinsurgency manual out the window. Especially when you consider that the guy who wrote the fricking thing is getting ready take command, you’d think who ever is getting all airstrike and raid crazy might take a step back to reconsider exactly what the hell they’re hoping to accomplish.

It’s looking more and more like a comedy of errors at this point. There are way too many plans at this point and each plan depends on the one before it working before it can go into affect:

• We need the Surge to work so we can reduce troops in Iraq
• One we reduce troops in Iraq we can send them elsewhere
• Elsewhere largely being Afghanistan
• Once there we can use the same tactics used in the Surge
• But first we need the Surge to work

As any private that has spent a week in the field can tell you, no plan survives contact with the enemy and whatever can go wrong will. There are lots of rabbits waiting to be pulled from lots of hats at this point and as things cool off in Afghanistan and everyone proceeds to bed down to reequip and retrain for the winter there are any number of wires that could come loose.

Airstrikes into tribal regions of Pakistan have become a de facto tactic for fighting in Afghanistan. There are no guarantees that the next president will allow the U.S. to use the airspace for the operations, and if the U.S. defies Pakistan and continues the attacks it will only be perceived as an act of war.

The Pashtun in Pakistan and Afghanistan, of course,  do not care where the line on the map falls. They will support the Pashtun. Combined with the ongoing conflict in Georgia, the U.S. has suffered some rather grim political setbacks. It will be interesting to watch how the next few weeks play out.

Well, golly-Ned. We can only wonder what crack agent of peace and justice cracked open this case that every foreign affairs blog and news source worth a damn has been reporting for years.

Keep up the good work, Spooks-R-Us. How’s that wall in Berlin doing these days?

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.

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.