Cocktailhag, the blog » Ambassador Eikenberry

America needs immediate treatment for its AA addiction to itself

rmp — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:18:48 +0000

American Arrogance not only leads us into unnecessary wars and other international disasters it also means our execution of these failed-from-the-start missions is woefully inadequate. That’s because Americans continue to insist that they are superior to everyone else in the world. When you are superior that means you know better than those inferiors you are trying to help. That means you don’t have to bother with understanding their culture and current situation. Just convert them to your culture and they will be forever grateful. See what I mean about arrogance and our addiction?

Even with the most recent horrendous failure examples of Iraq and Afghanistan only minute cracks are developing in the denial wall of those suffering from AA. One NYT article published yesterday shows the consequence of misguided development projects due to AA and another in WaPo hints that there is a slim chance AA can be brought under control. I will leave the question of whether a cure will ever be found for readers to ponder. It will probably come down to living one day at a time.

The Times article says the U.S. fears Iraq development projects to the tune of $53 billion may go to waste. It says that, “there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.” (Not sure how $53 billion may go to waste tracks with wasting hundreds of millions, but that’s the quality of “journalism” we get from our M$M today.)

First we destroy Iraq on lies and a desire to steal their oil, then in our attempts to help Iraqis reconstruct their country our officials who are investigating the failures say American authorities have, “repeatedly failed to ask Iraqis what sort of projects they needed and have not followed up with adequate training.” See why we need immediate treatment for AA?

It’s not as if the addicted weren’t warned as the idiocy progressed. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said his watchdog agency had “regularly raised concerns about the potential waste of U.S. taxpayer money resulting from reconstruction projects that were poorly planned, badly transferred, or insufficiently sustained by the Iraqi government.”

I know its painful, but I have to continue to build my case for a serious intervention. The Times article reported:

In hundreds of cases during the past two years, the Iraqi government has refused or delayed the transfer of American-built projects because it cannot staff or maintain them, Iraqi and American government officials say. Other facilities, including hospitals, schools and prisons built with American funds, have remained empty long after they were completed because there were not enough Iraqis trained to operate them.

“As large-scale construction projects — power plants, water-treatment systems and oil facilities — have been completed, there has been concern regarding the ability of Iraqis to maintain and fund their operations once they are handed over to the Iraqi authorities,” said a recent analysis prepared for Congress by the Congressional Research Service. The Government Accountability Office and the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction have also issued reports in the past several months about the potential failure of American-financed projects once they are transferred to Iraq.

We haven’t done any better in Afghanistan and the waste would be just as bad as Iraq, but Iraq kept only a trickle of money flowing to Afghanistan where civilian economic projects could have been far more successful than enlarged military operations that have mostly made things worse.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the moment she started her job has been saying the right things about changing the priorities. Those in the Obama administration who have been fighting a military surge, have been emphasizing projects that will help the Afghanistan government and its people to take charge of their own destiny. Both military and non-military assistance are very long-term projects. If Obama can’t see which of the two would get much longer support from the American voter and cost far less than one million per troop per year during our severe economic crisis then he is not as smart as people, including me, believe he is.

While the 2010 Defense budget for the first time calls for higher expenditures for Afghanistan over Iraq, the State Department has a paltry six billion to spend combined for 2009 and 2010. Ambassador Eikenberry has asked for at least 300 more civilians over the next three years to oversea the execution of non-military projects. The WaPo article I mentioned that hints at doing something about these repeated AA failures involves training of those civilians in Indiana. Training them in how to understand and work with different cultures. How novel.

As proof of how valid this training may be, the article said, “The State Department hopes that this kind of role-playing will prepare hundreds of new “civilian surge” recruits to deal with two foreign cultures — the U.S. military and Afghanistan.” The Post reported:

When President Obama announced what the White House called a “comprehensive new strategy” for the Afghanistan war last March, he called for a “dramatic increase in our civilian effort” that included additional diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country. Despite early difficulties finding and clearing sufficient numbers of volunteers, Deputy Secretary Jacob L. Lew said during a visit to Indiana on Thursday that the State Department was “on track” to triple the number of civilians, to 974, by early next year.

My hope is that when Obama announces his military decisions on the mission and exit strategy, he will also ask for a realistic amount of civilian resources and personnel to allow our military to exit ASAP. Even though this makes simple common sense, to wonder if it will happen shows the degree of AA addiction America must overcome.

War Hawks and President Obama, the COST is much too high

rmp — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:48:26 +0000

Frank Rich in his op-ed today really nailed the Afghanistan myths and the War Hawks deadly foolish desire to send 40-80,00 more troops into a mission and country they clearly don’t understand:

McChrystal thinks we might even jolly up those Muslims who historically and openly hate America. “I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven,” he told Dexter Filkins of The Times. “In my view their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior.”

Whether we could win those hearts and minds is, arguably, an open question — though it’s an objective that would require a partner other than Hamid Karzai and many more troops than even McChrystal is asking for (or America presently has). But to say that McChrystal’s optimistic — dare one say politically correct? — view of Muslim pliability doesn’t square with that of America’s hawks is the understatement of the decade.

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?

Rich points out that Matthew Hoh, a former active duty Marine and, until recently, a State Department official in Afghanistan, and retired three-star Army general and currently our Afghanistan ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry are asking the question of Obama no War Hawk can answer, “Do you want Americans fighting and dying for the Karzai regime? Rich’s final paras say it all:

We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives.

Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

All RWCAs (C is for Cowardly) whether in congress or the Serious national security “expert” world or the sick pundits, can counter one simple argument, even if McChrystal’s counterinsurgency proposal would eventually work (whatever work means), America simply can’t afford it. America can’t afford it economically or for the certain continuing loss of standing in the world and morally for what it will cost our brave men and women and their families in our military who will pay far too high a price and “to what end.” The end of America as we know it, not from a military win or defeat, but from an economic debt-ridden collapse and subsequent victory by our economic world competitors.

Neither al-Qaeda or the Taliban come even close to threatening our national security. America is the national security threat. The cost of continuing to go after terrorists, poses a grave threat due to a cost that is there for all to see if our “experts” and political “leaders” would just take off their arrogant, rose colored, we are better than anyone else glasses.

Our world competitors who have a great advantage because of what their workers are paid and what they don’t pay for their defense, are secretly cheering our farcical foolishness of believing we can afford the cost of staying long-term in Afghanistan. If we do, we have no chance economically but to become a failed empire full of suffering citizens who will look back and say, “How could we be so foolish to believe that fearing just thousands of terrorists and exporting American Democracy into a country that was far from ready was more important than our survival?”

In hindsight, think of what we could have accomplished and saved if we had just pumped money and technical assistance into Afghanistan after chasing al-Qaeda into Pakistan and not had political War Hawks, oil baron lovers, lie us into Iraq. Now we better have the foresight to see the utter foolishness of McChrystal’s desires as a competitive military commander to “win” and one who is not charged with considering the economic cost and where our true national security threat lies.