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Thomas Ricks thinks that the Iraq war is far from over. "This year we're in now, '09, is going to be, I think, a surprisingly tough year," Ricks told NBC's David Gregory.

Ricks believes that the Bush administration's surge strategy kicked the can down the road. "Basically the surge succeeded militarily, failed politically," he said. General Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, sees negative effects of the surge. "What he says is that Iraqis, many of them, used the breathing space we created to step backwards to become more sectarian, become more divided," explained Ricks.

Thomas Ricks is author of the new book, "The Gamble."

The Surge in Iraq essentially became a plan to bribe militants with guns and barrowloads of cash to not attack US troops and that left the core corruption, graft and incompetencies of the Iraqi government untouched and thus left the seeds of future conflict while temporarily tamping down violence to a level which would still horrify anyone West of Beirut. The planned surge in Afghanistan is likely to do the same there.

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

“It is very shameful, but probably I will pay the bribe,” Mohammed Naim, a young English teacher, said as he stood in front of the Secondary Courthouse in Kabul. His brother had been arrested a week before, and the police were demanding $4,000 for his release. “Everything is possible in this country now. Everything.”

Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.

It's utterly unclear how 30,000 extra American soldiers in the South are intended to remedy this situation - and if corruption remains untouched then allied forces will have to remain there in perpetuity to ensure any level of cohesive governance at all. Thus the two greatest drivers of the Taliban's resurgent insurgency will remain intact and anything done in Helmland takes on the character of an extended game of whack-a-mole.

However, extending cycles of violence until the point where they dropped off the medias radar worked in Iraq and gave the US an excuse to head (mostly) for the exits. The same might be true in Afghanistan. Matt Yglesias writes:

What I do think it’s worth reflecting on is what a big deal it really turns out to have been that the Bush administration screwed up back in the winter of 2001-2002 and failed to capute Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and the rest of the top al-Qaeda / Taliban leadership. Had we done that, I think we still would have been under a general moral and prudential obligation to try to assist the people of Afghanistan. But transforming Afghanistan into a prosperous, stable government with an effective central authority has always been a tall order. And if we’d achieved our core security objectives back six and a half years ago, then the stakes would be much lower if down the road foreign troops started to wear out their welcome for whatever reason. We could just leave.

Foreign troops have already worn out their welcome - even Karzai is looking for a timetable nowadays. But we're no closer to "a prosperous, stable government with an effective central authority" than we've ever been in Iraq - just as the Kurds or the federalist/seperatists of Basra - yet we're still leaving. It occurs to me that an Obama administration might look to re-engineer the exit from Iraq for Afghanistan. Paper over the cracks for long enough if they can, declare victory and visibly leave, while repurposing a large part of any occupation forces as "trainers". Then, of course, any later collapse isn't officially our fault for invading in the first place...

Crossposted from Newshoggers

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Sarah Chayes went to Afghanistan to report for National Public Radio just a few weeks after 9/11, then stayed to become one of the few Westerners running a business there. In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post she wrote that the big problem in Afghanistan isn't the resurgence of the Taliban. That's just a symptom of an epidemic of government corruption and the consequent failure of the rule of law, a gap which the Taliban are doing a better job of filling than either Karzai's government or US-led military forces.

In an interview with Bill Moyers on Friday, she expanded on her article.

SARAH CHAYES: Our democracy is famous for one thing in particular, checks and balances. That was the genius of the American system.

BILL MOYERS: Rule of law.

SARAH CHAYES: Rule of law but also recourse. If one branch of government is abusing you, you've got other branches of government that you can turn to.

BILL MOYERS: And Afghanistan?

SARAH CHAYES: Doesn't. So what we've really done is set up a kind of monopoly on the exercise of power. I mean, it's the opposite of what everything that we consider to be democracy, we've allowed an abusive concentration of power in the hands of, in particular, the executives, be it, in particular, on a local level like the provincial governors and their acolytes. Because we've convinced ourselves and often we have to - by "we" I mean us and our NATO allies - convince our own public opinion that this is a democratically elected representative government of Afghanistan in order to justify the sacrifices in money and troops and things like that. But the Afghans see it differently. The Afghans say you brought these people in here. We repudiated-

... SARAH CHAYES: The ordinary population. The people I work with are villagers. They're semi-literate, illiterate, these are really ordinary men and women. And they all are telling me, "You brought these people back into Afghanistan. We had repudiated them in the early 1990s. We knew what these people are. They're"-

BILL MOYERS: Warlords, right?

SARAH CHAYES: Yes. Yes.

BILL MOYERS: The criminal class.

SARAH CHAYES: Exactly. So you brought them in and now you're backing them up. And you are making it impossible for us to make our voices heard and to have any leverage on the behavior of these people.

The Obama administration has said that it will dramatically increase the US military presence in Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters in Kabul on Saturday that there will be up to 30,000 more US troops in the country by midsummer. Which will go some way to treating the symptom - that resurgent Taliban presence - but won't get at the underlying causes at all. Instead, those troops will help prop up the criminals and warlords currently in charge of the official Afghan government (even President Karzai's brother is widely accused of being heavily involved in the opium trade but protected by the government) while continuing to alienate the common Afghan people through indiscriminate attacks on civilians. In turn, the Taliban's hand will continue to strengthen as people turn to what is actually the lesser of two evils - and the whole cycle renews itself indefinitely.

Thanks as ever, to Heather for the vid clips.

And it's 1..2...3..what are we not fighting for?

Via Kevin Drum comes a piece in the NYT looking at the powderkeg of factional tensions in Mosul.

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is squeezing out Kurdish units of the Iraqi Army from Mosul, sending the national police and army from Baghdad and trying to forge alliances with Sunni Arab hard-liners in the province, who have deep-seated feuds with the Kurdistan Regional Government led by Massoud Barzani.

....“It’s the perfect storm against the old festering background,” warned Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, who oversees Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces and the Kurdish region. Worry is so high that the American military has already settled on a policy that may set a precedent, as the United States slowly withdraws to allow Iraqis to settle their own problems. If the Kurds and Iraqi government forces fight, the American military will “step aside,” General Thomas said, rather than “have United States servicemen get killed trying to play peacemaker.”

As one of Drum's commenters notes:

As I recall it, the program was: (1) increase troop levels (2) to reduce the violence to make space for (3) political reconciliation that will provide the foundation for (4) a reduction in violence not dependent on American troops (5) that will enable us to gradually withdraw without having to worry about whether Iraq will blow up again.

We never got past step 2. Now the reckoning.

That reckoning will involve violence, in more than one place and between more than just two factions, in the lead up to Iraq's provincial elections. The only real question is: how bad will it get? I totally understand Brig. Gen Thomas' wish not to have his people die policing a civil war six years into the U.S. occupation but doesn't this blow wide open the conservative talking point, so beloved of both Bush and McCain, that US troops have to stay in Iraq to help prevent such violence? Why are we still there?

Of course, if there's no new status of forces deal by January Thomas' plans become moot, since it's likely US forces would be confined to base anyway. In fact, they're using the threat of exactly that to try to strongarm Iraqi into accepting an agreement it isn't happy with. McClatchy reports:

The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq’s economy, educational sector and other areas _ "everything" _ said Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s Sunni Muslim vice president. "I didn’t know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services."

Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed “tens” of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.

But if the US military is planning to stay out of any faction fights anyway, just how much of a threat is that?

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Amy Goodman talks with Nir Rosen about his Taliban embed.

Nir Rosen imbedded with the Taliban for his latest report on Afghanistan, out now in Rolling Stone. His experiences included almost being executed by a fanatical Taliban local warlord, but he came away with the conclusion that adding more troops to Afghanistan won’t work, and that we should prepare an exit strategy.

Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement — to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.

"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now — or are even nominally allied with the government — are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability.

John McCain's strategy - following the Bush administration in handing policymaking to General Petraeus - isn't going to work any better. Talking our way to an exit from the doomed adventure in Afghanistan really is the only way out of that grim trap.

Spencer Ackerman calls Rosen's report an instant classic of war reporting and I totally agree. Just read it, ok?

Crossposted from Newshoggers

McClatchy reports that the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is almost complete and that it " warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year," directly contradicting John McCain's claims in Tuesday's debate that the Surge has been a success and victory has been attained.

That's not a major surprise to anyone who follows events in Iraq without neocon rose-tinted glasses. Deep conflicts between the central government and Kurdish region, Awakening groups and Sadrists have all been put on a knife-edge by expectations for the upcoming provincial elections, which have been gerrymandered to keep the existing incumbents in the Green Zone in power. The Turks are looking down a gunbarrel at the Kurds and the Awakening is looking at losing its source of income - being paid not to be insurgents - while even the Green Zone elites are falling out among themselves over Maliki's newfound Napoleon complex. The chances of Iraq lasting another year without another significant outbreak of violence are small to none.

All of those sources of conflict are outlined in the draft NIE, according to more than "a half-dozen officials" who spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because NIE's are very restricted circulation documents.

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Download | play    Download | play   (h/t Heather)

While declining to land any personal blows on John McCain, Barack Obama remained cool, confident and dare I say it?  Presidential in tonight's debate to John McCain's Grampy McCrankypants routine.  It appears that the pundits and flash polls agree, as the majority of those polls scored it for Obama, including Frank "The Hair" Luntz's dial polls on *gasp* FOX News (maybe that's why they don't have them up on the website).

But there was one moment where Obama was direct and on the offense, without the petulance of McCain, as he confronted McCain's rote recitation of being smart but unpopular by supporting the surge.  From the flash polls I've seen, this moment resonated deeply with those undecided voters, especially since McCain would not even look Obama in the eye.

 OBAMA: But understand, that was a tactic designed to contain the damage of the previous four years of mismanagment of this war. And so John likes...John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge, the war started in 2003. And at the time, when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were, you were wrong. You said that we would be greeted as liberators, you were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni and you were wrong. And so the question is the judgment of whether or not...

MCCAIN: Senator Obama...Senator Obama...Senator Obama doesn't....

OBAMA: ...whether or not the question is who is best equipped as the next president to make good decisions about how we use our military, how we make sure that we are prepared and ready for the next conflict and I think we can take a look at our judgment.

The Obama campaign provided some fact checks on McCain's claims about the surge, below the fold:

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Earlier, John Amato noted that General David Petraeus is using phrases like "Long struggle", "not irreversible", "still hard", "many clouds on the horizon"…and of course the ever fresh "fragile" progress.

John asks "Is that what success is, fragile?"

Well, yes.

- In the North, Kurdish peshmerga are facing off against the Iraqi Army and the Kurds are stealthily landgrabbing around the disputed city of Kirkuk. Amid accusations of kurdish oppression and ethnic clearing of Arabs in the region, it is "now on the verge of exploding." Any such explosion would lead to American forces choosing between three allies - the Kurds, Iraqi central government and NATO member Turkey, who would not sit idly by while a Kurdish independent state was formed.

- Also in the North, in the Sunni city of Mosul, violence is rising again. The number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July. But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. The reason is simple - Maliki's Shiite majority are cracking down on other Sunni dissenters under the guise of hunting Al Qaeda.

- Across Sunni regions, there's a growing storm of discontent among members of the Awakening. The US says there are 100,000 Sons of iraq but the Iraqi government only admits to 50,000 - and they only plan to find new jobs for 20% of those. The rest are to be cut off and told that if they continue to carry weapons they are criminals. You can guess how that's going to go. If even 20% of the Sons of Iraq return to violence, they'll comprise an insurgency equal in size to the highest US estimates of Al Qaeda in Iraq at its zenith.

- In the Shiite South, the Sadrist movement still isn't dead or defeated. But it has been pushed into the arms of Iran, from whom it had previously mainteained a distance despite rightwing claims otherwise. Sadr is streamlining his movement into a massive political arm and a smaller military one, and his people are still observing his self-imposed ceasefire. But that could yet change - there's a move among the Green Zone elite to run provincial elections under the old laws since they can't get a new law passed. This would disenfranchise Sadrists along with all the other "powers that aren't" (like the Awakening movement) and, with no prospect for getting their voices heard peacefully, the pressure to return to violence to get some say will be overwhelming.

So, all this explains why Petraeus is telling the BBC that he will "never declare victory" in Iraq. Because he knows full well that there's every reason to believe that the entire country could blow up again and the "success' of the Surge even in reducing violence will be seen to be entirely temporary.

But all this hasn't stopped John McCain, Joe Lieberman and others pushing a "sense of the Senate" amendment on the fiscal year 2009 Defense Authorization bill. Lieberman introduced the amendment, which he described as "bipartisan" even though it has no Democratic sponsors. In part it reads:

[It is the sense of the Senate to] recognize the success of the troop surge in Iraq and its strategic significance in advancing the vital national interests of the United States in Iraq, the Middle East, and the world, in particular as a strategic victory in a central front of the war on terrorism

Which is simply a lie, according to the military's own assessments, and is purely designed to allow the McCain campaign to trot out the names of all those who vote for this amendment (and who vote against it)for political purposes. If you're a Democat and vote "Yay", you disagree with Obama; if you vote "Nay", you're a defeatist who won't acknowledge "the troops" success in McCain's precious Surge. Either way, McCain has a new attack.That the military itself doesn't really acknowledge that "success" - for good reasons - has nothing to do with McCain's cynical move.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

John McCain has made much of how he was correct about the Surge in Iraq when his opponent was saying it wouldn't work. Barack Obama has been moving gradually further towards McCain's position, propelled there by a narrative that questions his original judgement in the face of drastic cuts in Iraqi violence which have popularly been ascribed to the Surge. He's now at the point of saying it "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

But how close to reality are McCain and Obama's positions? Well, for a start it's unclear that it's actually the Surge that has been instrumental in lowering Iraqi violence (to parity with some of the world's bloodiest conflicts instead of being in a class of its own). The Sunni Awakening and a ceasefire by the Shiite Sadrist movement must also take a large part of the credit and, despite McCain's attempt at rewriting history, both pre-dated the Surge. Indeed, even General Petraeus admits the possibility that, due to these entirely local developments, violence in Iraq might have fallen just as much even without the Surge.

Paying the Awakening movement some $30 million a month to not attack US troops wasn't originally a part of the Surge plan that McCain backed and it's unlikely he would have supported such a move in any case. John McCain has made much of Barack Obama's supposed wish for "appeasement" of terrorists in negotiating with Iran or Hamas - how much worse is it then to bring terrorists onto the payroll? Many of the Awakening's so-called Sons of Iraq were previously members of the insurgency.

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   General James T. Conway, the Marine in charge of security in Iraq's Anbar province the Commandant of the Marine Corps [that'll teach me to pay attention to names when writing posts at 1am. I knew this], has said that US forces there could hand over control to the Iraqi government as soon as Monday, and is lauding the reduction in violence in the province. The general says that remaining US troops in the province will concentrate on bringing Sunnis and Shiites together. But the handover was intended to happen last month, though a sharp uptick in violence there delayed the event, along with a convenient sandstorm. Veteran and blogger Brandon Freidman documented that increase back in May.

 And wrote that:

While I do not profess to know exactly what change in the political climate precipitated this specific spike in violence, I do know that General Petraeus was correct when he said that the placidity in Anbar Province was reversible.  What most have failed to realize thus far is that, while al Qaeda is deeply unpopular in Anbar, U.S. forces are equally despised.  So it seems that those who've repeatedly used Anbar's relative peacefulness as a sign of impending U.S. success in Iraq know little about counterinsurgency and less about Iraq.

Success in Iraq is something that will be brought about by Iraqis--not the American military.  As long as we're there, the best we can hope for is extreme violence broken by periodic lulls--such as what we've witnessed in Anbar over the past seven months.  As long we remain in Iraq, the violence will remain cyclical.  It will rise and fall, contingent on the latest deal we've cut with tribal leaders or the latest deal that someone has brokered within the Iraqi government.  But our military will never completely solve this inherently Iraqi problem.  We're watching that unfortunate fact unfold before us in Anbar this month.

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  The Iraqi prime minister has shot down the Bush administration - and McCain's - Iraq policy by announcing publicly that there will be a timetable, and it will contain a fixed date. The White House and the pro-war lobby are spinning like tops, but it's impossible to put disguise their humiliation.

There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

... In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said there had been a draft agreement but that it needed to "go through a number of levers in the Iraqi political system before we actually have an agreement from the Iraqi side." "Until we have a deal, we don't have a deal," he said. He declined to comment on the 2011 withdrawal date.

Spin, spin, spin - but Maliki's having none of it.

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  President Karzai of Afghhanistan's signature is on a pardon for three gang-rapists who just happened to be cronies of a former Taliban commander and Afghan MP. The woman who was raped and her family didn't even know about it until the men turned up in their village again, but Karzai's office says he doesn't know anything about it.

“Everyone was shocked,” said Sara’s husband, Dilawar, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “These were men who had been sentenced and found guilty by the Supreme Court, walking around freely.”

Sara’s case highlights concerns about the close relationship between the Afghan president and men accused of war crimes and human rights abuses.

The men were freed discreetly but the rape itself was public and brutal. It took place in September 2005, in the run up to Afghanistan’s first democratic parliamentary elections.

... A copy of the pardon was numbered, dated in May and appeared to bear the personal signature of Hamid Karzai. It recommended the men’s release because, it said, “they had been forced to confess to their crimes.”

When showed copies of the presidential pardon and court papers, President Karzai’s spokesman, Hamayun Hamidzada, was visibly shocked and said that if the documents proved genuine, Mr Karzai would be “upset and appalled.”

He said it was impossible that President Karzai could knowingly have signed a pardon for rapists, but refused to speculate on how the pardon could have come about.

An Afghan MP told the Independent's Kate Clark that “The commanders, the war criminals, still have armed groups,” he said. “They’re in the government. Karzai, the Americans, the British sit down with them. They have impunity. They’ve become very courageous and can do whatever crimes they like.” UN officials say cases such as this are increasingly common - and the family of Sara, the raped woman, are in hiding again.

There's none of this that an Afghan Surge can solve - just as the Iraqi Surge hasn't solved very similiar problems there. And yet again the need to pretend that "democracy" follows in the Bush administration's wake outweighs the needs of the common people, while exiles pushed by the West and local crooks carve up the country to suit themselves.  Such nice allies we have.

The WSJ says Maliki and Bush are about to agree a timetable that agrees with Obama's timetable.

Even "Saint Pet" Petraeus says the Sunni Awakening is at least as responsible as any other cause for the reduction of violence in Iraq -now Maliki's people say they're ready to throw the Awakening under the reconcilliation bus and declare it illegal - perhaps as early as November 1st. You can bet the Awakening folks won't be thrilled about it and the received wisdom is that they'll express their displeasure by returning to violent insurgency.

 McCain's beloved Surge won't have accomplished a lasting reduction and Bush will have already committed the US to substantial withdrawal. Could McCain's Iraq policy get any more tattered? Will the establishment media notice as Republicans do another 180 and claim that the prospect of renewed violence means the US must stay in Iraq, just as the (almost certainly temporary) reduction in violence meant the US must stay in Iraq?

Who has the better judgement, the man who advocated a Surge that had a minor role in saving Iraq from being an even bigger disaster or the man who said we shouldn't embark on that disastrous war to start with? 

Matt Duss writes: "The good news is we have Al Qaeda on the ropes in Iraq. The bad news is we allowed Iraq to become a sanctuary (and recruiting poster and training ground and sectarian killing field) to start with, by invading Iraq."

McCain helped create the war in Iraq and, like many another war-booster, predicted it would be a cakewalk. He wants us to ignore his terrible judgement of 2001-2003 and is careful to only talk about 2007 onwards as if the rest happened in a different dimension. Now that better COIN tactics and a lotof help from folks who used to shoot at US troops have reduced violence but done nothing to usher in a new era of Iraqi reconciliation, he wants us to ignore all that and credit a small increase in troop numbers which he happened to support for "victory".

The mainstream media seem willing to do just that, but that's no reason why he and they should get a free ride.

A Guardian journalist returns home to Iraq to find that far from what we hear in the US, the surge has produced nothing approaching normalcy or peace, but rather ghettos seething with violence, with nothing but makeshift walls dividing the increasingly hostile warring factions.

"US claims that the military surge is bringing stability to Iraq. By traveling through the heart of Baghdad its easy to see by enclosing the Sunni and Shia populations behind 12ft walls, the surge has left the city more divided and desperate than ever."

Check out parts 2 & 3 of this amazing report. It's undoubtedly the most realistic and candid view of Iraq you will ever see:

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 2 of 3): killing fields 

Baghdad 5 years on (part 3): Iraq's lost generation

(h/t Bill W.)