Of course, Obama, McCain and everyone else in the world are rushing to heap praise on “The Surge” (lemon-lime flavor) for its successes without any real idea of what has been accomplished. Yes, violence is down, the streets are quiet, things seem to be improving, but this has all been bought at the expense that Iraq is now more reliant on U.S. forces than before. Post-surge troop levels are higher still than pre-surge levels. No one really knows that fewer U.S. forces mean, but its a fair guess that the bad guys have read Mao and Lao Tzu even if we have not. No one was looking to kick up trouble when the boys were in town.

Being that a good portion of these guys are still around and waiting for the green flag, the best option for Al-Maliki is showing the Americans the door and tapping his foot impatiently until we leave.

This is only the opening shots of what looks suspiciously like a good old fashioned power struggle in Iraq. The U.S. got real cozy with Europe after the fun times of kings and monarchs alternately killing or sleeping with each other, so its experience in messy political arrangements could probably fit on the back of an envelope. Besides that, the U.S. has some of the best natural barriers ever designed - the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on the sides and two non-military powers to the top and bottom. Throughout a nasty, brutish and short history the U.S. hasn’t had to cut many deals with the end goal of staying the hell alive.

Iraq, on the other hand, aint the U.S. Iraq sits smack dab on top of some of the nastiest most blood soaked soil in the world. If you don’t believe me, try this fun little bit of compressed world history:

If you really want to score extra points you’ve also got to realize that Iraq is also the major fault line between Sunni and Shia Islam, not to mention half a dozen or so break aways up north in Kurd land.

The end of the story is that living, and especially governing in Iraq is a story of busting heads, knees and caps. We thought we had it bad during the Civil War when folks lined up like they were going to the movies and marched in step toward each other like a bunch of morons. You can just imagine some old timey biblical warriors, the ones that thought raping and killing and all was what you did when the battle was over. Sherman might have thought he was tough when he leveled Atlanta — his one foul up was that after burning the city he should have slaughtered the survivors THEN salted the earth to make the land uninhabitable. Point is, at the end of the day your Americans don’t know much about keeping your head on your shoulders in a bad neighborhood but you can bet al-Maliki and the current bureaucrats in Iraq are putting in their overtime to keep the shrouds over their asses when the Americans eventually leave.

What this mean isn’t much of a shock. Nouri Al Maliki is a Shia Muslim so was the guy before him, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The president, Jalal Talabani, is Sunni but Kurdish, and the rest of the Sunni in Iraq have a pretty good recent history of killing the Kurds. The recent hold up over elections stem from Kurdish gripes about trying to continue the de-Kurdification of Kirkuk started under Saddam Hussein. Guess what group Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, moved up there to route the Kurds out? That would be the same group that just rejoined the government upon the likely realization that Sunni voices were about to get a lot quieter in Iraq.

So the obvious choice for Iraq to buddy up with is their dear, sweet neighbor - Iran. Well, what do you know - there they are! And can you imagine a worse outcome for Washington, the U.S. military and the Republican Party than five years worth of effort, thousands of folks dead, mauled or deformed and round abouts of a trillion dollars only to have our pet country snuggling up with the regions biggest anti-American antagonist? There isn’t a writer alive that can conjure up irony like father time. It’s like the MasterCard commercial from hell. The social discontent that would follow an Iraq-Iran alliance — priceless.

But it’s not like there are any other cards on the table. The Shia majority in Iraq isn’t going to have anything to do with the Wahabbi nuts in Saudi Arabia, the Kurds aren’t going to agree to any agreement with Turkey, Syria can’t even manage Lebanon. Who’s left - Jordan and Kuwait? Boy, there’s a security alliance you can hang your hat on. Not to mention all the good press you get by buddying up with the most pro-Israel country in the region or of going to a nation you steam-rolled 20 years ago with your hat in your hands.

None of this really matters if al-Maliki can’t shuck the Americans off his back, which he seems to be doing with a sudden spring of enthusiasm. Contrary to the noise from the cable pundits Al Sadr is not defeated, the Sunni separatists are not run out and the Kurdish militants aren’t giving up. As bright as General Petraeus is, when it comes to understanding Iraq he’s going to have a 1,000 point handicap to even an idiot that is from there. If al-Maliki can’t prove he’s the top dog then someone will be along to replace him, and someone who might not sit so well with the U.S. Chances are, even if we do luck up and keep al-Maliki the pretense of a kinder, gentler, democratic Iraq will likely go out the window. The Middle-East has always been a place of conflicting cultures and civilizations and it probably always will be.

What we’re seeing is a gamble in Iraq. We’re seeing whether ours will pay off, whether we have the good sense to leave when asked. If we don’t we’ll delegitimize Al-Maliki and anyone chosen to replace him as an American puppet. Then we’ll see if al-Maliki can steer the cart without any help. If it doesn’t work, we’ll see how well Americans handle excruciating dissapointment.

John McCain has criticized Barrack Obama for not going “over there,” so the Democratic nominee has decided to go get his “done gone and seen” credentials.

Like any good project manager, any general officer is going to show off his best and brightest while carefully keeping the unpainted rooms of the house and the smelly kids tucked away in the backyard. This is not an information gathering trip so much as a pitch - Barrack Obama will get the “fund us better” pitch just like John McCain got the “fund us better” pitch and every national politician that goes gets the “fund us better” pitch.

Since Obama is apparently hauling half of the entire U.S. press corps with him there will undoubtedly be the token shots of him buying a rug /talking to the locals with a soulful look on his face / looking patriotic with the troops.

Then we can all pitch in and get him a “I went to Iraq and all I got was this lousy presidency” T-shirt.

It’s pretty obvious that Lisa doesn’t read the Ball Gunner. In fact, I’m not sure what Lisa reads. But I know what she writes:

Pakistan will have to confront domestic opposition and go back on the military offensive in the tribal areas, working closely with U.S. and NATO forces to control the Afghan-Pakistani border. Although such operations may be unpopular in Pakistan in the short-term, they are necessary if Pakistan wants to limit the chances of future U.S. unilateral military strikes that could lead to long-term destabilization of the country.

Sweet robotic Jesus cakes! This is one prize pig!
Despite the fact that Pakistani VOTERS are quite unhappy with us, they better learn to get with the program or we’re just going to do it regardless — even if doing it is obviously detrimental. And this woman writes for a THINK TANK?!

I encourage anyone and everyone to wade through that piece, or column, or think-tankery; whatever they call it. More than anything fills in the lines of how incredibly deluded people seem to be when it comes to Central Asia and it demonstrates either ignorance or ambivalence that Pakistan is a democracy. There is also profound resentment among Pakistanis about U.S. interference in their country, a resentment that recently welled to the surface in the sound defeat of Pervez Musharaf’s party in Pakistan’s elections.

Losing the unchallenged support of Musharaf was a hard hit to the U.S. influence in the region. The current government is a much harder sell when it comes to marching to our drum. Of course, if we follow Lisa Curtis’ advice we might just find ourselves with a government that is actively hostile.

It was to be the big shiny jewel of the Iraq war.

Anbar province, that grimy hole that was home to the Sunni insurgency was to officially leave the hands of the U.S. Marines and fall to the Iraqis.

It was scheduled, then rescheduled, and now… canned until later in the year.

  BAGHDAD — In a sign of the bitter political struggle playing out in western Iraq, the Anbar Provincial Council appealed Saturday for the American military to delay its handover of provincial security responsibilities to Iraqi forces until at least the end of the year, according to the council chairman.

Any long-term delay in the transfer would be a blow to American efforts to portray the province, once a Sunni extremist stronghold, as having nearly completed a security turnaround. And the request is likely to intensify fears among Anbaris that quarrels between the two powers in the province — the entrenched Iraqi Islamic Party and the up-and-coming political movement of pro-American Awakening Councils — could escalate into armed conflict.

Golly. What a shock.

PS - TWO Ball Gunner updates in one day. It’s like Christmas!

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.

But, I also have an exciting announcement: the Ball Gunner has joined the Department of Defense Blogger’s Roundtable. I’ve only participated in one session so far; myself and a dozen or so others got to put Army Col. Thomas McGrath, commander of NATO’s Afghanistan Regional Security Command South, to the rack about recent operations in Afghanistan since the Kandahar prison escape.

This was not some hand-holding venture where soft questions were gently lobbed to waiting arms. These are serious bloggers with good questions. Other attendees included the Long War Journal and Bouhammer.

Because the crowd was big and the time limited the Ball Gunner only got two licks in (note gratuitous Chuck Norris reference):

(full transcript available here)

 My question sort of goes to the size of the attack and the possibles support. We’ve probably all seen the old Chuck Norris movies where, you know, one person goes in and is able to do all this. But it really sounds like this was a pretty large operation that would probably require a good deal of support from surrounding communities.

How is NATO working to secure that these communities aren’t winning
support back from the Taliban?

COL. MCGRATH: Well, the first part: It really wasn’t, in my opinion, that large of an attack.

It didn’t take much to get a truck in there, rig it with explosives and then blow your way through and then have a couple of fighters to do some shooting.

And, you know, the jail’s not like our jails or our prisons. They’re pretty much regular buildings. They can be easily opened up and people can be rushed out. So I’m sure they may have known that something might have been going on. I don’t know, but I don’t give them that much credit for doing some type of commando-style raid. They took advantage of an opportunity and they were successful in it.

As far as the surrounding communities, you know, we have gone through several different programs to train the police up. And I’ve told the other bloggers on previous interviews as to focused district development, where we’re taking the police out and retraining the entire police forces, not only in Kandahar City but for all the other districts in Region South, and that’s been working very successfully. And we’re also doing that to the west, to the north of the cities and pretty much throughout the region.

So we also have the Afghan National Army that’s deployed throughout the area. And so that’s how we’re trying to secure the outlying regions.

So the — it’s difficult, though. It doesn’t take much, you know, to put something like that together and just have people running through the streets in the middle of the night, making a run for it. We were able to track a bunch down in the first couple of hours. We deployed one of the commando battalions from the ANA and they’re very successful in killing about 20 Taliban who we think were from the prison because they assembled in a courthouse and shot at them. So they were able to talk attack very quickly.

So we do have a comprehensive plan to secure the city, both on the army and the police side and assistance from coalition and also in the outlying regions.

And the second:

Q Okay. Bringing all these troops down into the area, I’ve been looking at some ethnographic maps, and you’re pretty firmly in Ghilzai territory there. The Ghilzai have been kind of the historical agitators in Afghanistan. How are they trying to, I guess — or how is NATO trying to adjust for, you know, really bringing in a military that’s going to include Durrani Pashtun, Uzbeks, Tajiks? I mean, is there any worry that that itself will cause friction?

COL. MCGRATH: Well, that’s a good question. Great point. You know, we need more recruits from the south. And the important thing is that we provide the security down here, which is happening, but it has to be long term. It has to be enduring so that people feel safe to join.

No, I’m not too concerned about any conflicts. We have a lot of different tribes and units working together. (Beep heard.) Whoops, still there?

Q I’m still here.

COL. MCGRATH: Oh, okay. I heard something beep. Excuse me.

Yeah, Afghanistan needs to have a national army. They do. The police need to have a national police force. We’re working towards that. And, you know, the country needs to come together. Yeah, the south is a tough place. If you’re going to win the war, you got to win down here. I think part of that is recruiting a large number of people for the army from this area.

And we have recruiting programs. It’s just a matter of time until we get better security in some of the outlying regions so that they can have their sons join up and serve.

Does that answer — help answer –

Q It definitely did. Is there any concern about the cross- border traffic from Pakistan and the roles that it’s played — might have played in the recent prison attack?

COL. MCGRATH: I don’t know if anything from across the border had something to do with the prison attack. But yes, we’re very concerned about what’s coming across the border and the agitation that they’re trying to raise up here.

Q Yes.

COL. MCGRATH: As you know, President Karzai was very concerned about it. He made some comments last week about a few things, what he wanted to do. But there is a problem. It needs to be addressed.

Much thanks to the DoD for extending this opportunity. And look forward to more Ball Gunner updates from the Roundtable.

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.

SEOUL | Extending the tours of U.S. troops serving in South Korea to three years and allowing them to bring their families is overdue, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday as he arrived in Seoul.

The change in deployments is caught up in the ongoing transfer of military bases to South Korean control, but Mr. Gates said it’s time to stop the one-year, unaccompanied tours that forces currently serve here because it is considered a war zone.

“As a matter of principle, I think it’s past time” to extend the tours, Mr. Gates told reporters traveling with him on the plane to Seoul. “It communicates that … our view of the reality here is that the Republic of Korea is literally safe enough for our families to be present.”

A year in Korea aint exactly the same as a year in Anbar, so this move really makes a good deal of sense. But, as just about anyone in the military can attest to, the year-long Korea “hardship” tour is sort of known as an unofficial “marriage break.”

Not to say that every married man that goes to Korea winds up running around. But, my best guess from talking to people returning from the tour is that the official Ballgunner estimate is that LOTS do. I never had the pleasure of serving in Korea, but met plenty that did. Most of them had stories, if not first-hand accounts then at least as witnesses. Even Germany (the Ballgunner’s favorite station,) where guys COULD bring their wives, saw a fair bit of relationship cat and mouse.

“Alright PFC Jones, you’re 20 years old, you’ve been married for two years. Now, we’re going to send you to South Korea, where most young women are about 5 feet tall and weigh about 100 pounds. Your wife has to stay here.” 

Once Jones gets on the ground his squad and platoon members welcome him in classic military fashion — by getting hammered. A few glasses of Soju later and Jones is feeling that he is really going to like Korea. Mrs. Jones is a long way away, and the other guys are all talking to girls. Well, who know? It’s not a fluke that gave rise to the Army’s unofficial motto of the Korean tour, “Go there married, come home divorced.”

I’m not saying Secretary Gates, who probably knows almost nothing about enlisted men, has this in mind when he’s proposing his changes. But it is something to think about. The brothels in Seoul are spoken of with awe and reverence in certain Army battalions.

But once prospects become unreasonable then, by all means, lose away.

These bits of optimism are cheery. William Lind once recounted the anecdote of a junior officer in the Wehrmacht who said in 1945 that Berlin was an ideal place for his office, as he would soon be able to take a street car between the two fronts.

It certainly doesn’t work like this:

 The foreign policy fight between John McCain and Barack Obama flared up again Monday when the candidates jabbed one another over over how to address the threat posed by Iran.

While the two have been feuding since President Bush last week told the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, that a policy of appeasement is a “foolish delusion,” the heated rhetoric rose a notch after Obama said Sunday night that Iran is not an equivalent threat to the Soviet Union.

“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet,” Obama told voters in Pendleton, Ore.

I’m certainly willing to agree that the elected legions of the federal government are staffed, with few exceptions throughout history, by the utterly feckless legions of smarmy smiles and brainless platitudes. To the grinning elector-ites, this chest-thumptitude is simply capital. It fires up the rubes, warms up the senses of righteous indignity, makes them sound all heroic, and leaves them feeling like they, too, enjoy a good bathroom stance with the manly W-I-D-E stance.

But outside the people polishing their teeth for the next election, and lurking beneath the bureaucratic brontosaurus of the Pentagon, there exist small pocket of competence that are treading water with all their might trying to keep the nation’s head above water.

These people know the score. They realize that politicians are not the tools of affecting change in the world (they are, in fact, mostly tools.) They realize that this is not a world of absolutes; that we do not get to set all the rules, or take our ball and go home if the game isn’t to our liking.

Having gotten themselves this far, they also probably realize that all roads do not lead to Washington. They realize that you don’t move anything in the mid-East by antagonizing Iran. They realize that the Shia population of the world looks to the mullahs in Tehran. They realize that since Shia militias have fought and won two major battles (some items at link NSFW) lately and the chips are moving across the table quicker than many people estimated.

Knowing Iran’s potential, and having seen disturbances across the region, they’ve figured out that Iran’s hand is not nuclear, is probably no where near nuclear, but is still strong. They can pass cards under the table to Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Shia fighters in Iraq. They can pass a few cards at a time or they can start handing whole decks and disrupt the whole game.

These are people who know that talking to Iran is not appeasement, it is a simple fact of life in working in the mid-East. They realize that the talks are the stuff the CNNs and Fox Newses know about, or even want to know about. It might be  that these talks are things neither the president nor the three sock puppets running for office know about.

The U.S. military is a temporary force in Iraq. If it’s there another 50 years that will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire global history of Persians (Iranians) and Arabs (Iraqis) and Pashtuns (Afghans) who have evolved and grown and fought and conquered and bloodied and allied and married and feuded and carried on like people do for a few good millennium before Europe even entered the global conscious.

It’s politics and sausage and the inevitable dealings with things not as pleasant as we might like.