Posts Tagged ‘George Friedman’

Obama, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani ISI

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

George Friedman at Stratfor on Obama’s plans for Afghanistan and the parallels with Vietnam. He notes that US/ARVN forces were never defeated by the NVA, but that the NVA won because of their superior intelligence thanks to widespread penetration of ARVN forces by communist sympathizers. He says (and I think he’s correct) that Afghan forces are similarly riddled with Taliban sympathizers, making it impossible for us to win without marshaling similar penetration of the Taliban with intelligence assets.

The problem with this is, the Afghans are already compromised and lack the expertise, while the US doesn’t have the personnel to place intelligence assets with the Taliban. Both of these are also probably true.

His suggestion to fill this gap is to use the Pakistani ISI (the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA or KGB), or at least elements therein. If that is indeed our best hope in Afghanistan, we are totally screwed. He mentions that Taliban has worked closely with the ISI and are already compromised, but that doesn’t go nearly far enough. My understanding is that the Taliban were essentially created by the ISI, or at least Jihadist elements in it, with more than a little help from Saudi money. The degree to which Islamists have been purged from the ISI is open to debate (my gut feeling is very little). They’re not so much a subordinate part of the government as a power player within it, with their own goals and agendas, in an country that not only suffers from ethnic divisions, but is largely an artificial conglomerate created by the post-Independence partition of India in 1947. There’s no reason to believe that Pakistan is any more unified than, say, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union was in 1990.

My guess is that the United States would be better off creating our own Afghan intelligence service from the ground up, possibly starting with old elements of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, assuming elements of such could be scrounged up, and the Tajik/Pushtan divide bridged.

It was almost certainly a mistake for Obama to pre-announce when US troops would start withdrawing. But there are no good choices or easy victories to be had here.

(Just for the record, I had an article called “The Way to Afghan Peace” published in The World & I way back in 1992, so I actually have a long-running interest in the region. But the players, positions, and motivations of what actually goes on there are frequently murky not only to me, but even to far more experienced experts.)

Problems Presented by the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Trial

Monday, November 16th, 2009

There’s an interesting article up by George Friedman at Stratfor discussing the difficulties of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court of law:

“Imagine that in addition to stating that the United States was at war with Japan, Franklin Roosevelt also called for bringing the individual Japanese pilots who struck Hawaii to justice under American law. This would make no sense.”

But, of course, terrorist members of al Qaeda are not soldiers under international law. Friedman spells it out quite clearly:

“International law is actually not particularly ambiguous about the status of the members of al Qaeda. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to them because they have not adhered to a fundamental requirement of the Geneva Conventions, namely, identifying themselves as soldiers of an army. Doing so does not mean they must wear a uniform. The postwar Geneva Conventions make room for partisans, something older versions of the conventions did not. A partisan is not a uniformed fighter, but he must wear some form of insignia identifying himself as a soldier to enjoy the conventions’ protections. As Article 4.1.6 puts it, prisoners of war include ‘Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.’ The Geneva Conventions of 1949 does not mention, nor provide protection to, civilians attacking foreign countries without openly carrying arms.”

“Under the Geneva Conventions, [Mohammed]’s actions in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out without uniforms or other badges of a combatant, denies him status and protection as a POW.”

Clear, succinct, and what conservatives have been saying for the past eight years, which pretty much ensures that no one in the Obama Administration will read it.

“The real problem here is international law, which does not address acts of war committed by non-state actors out of uniform. Or more precisely, it does, but leaves them deliberately in a state of legal limbo, with captors left free to deal with them as they wish.”

The article goes on at length to explain taht it is equally impossible to try him under civilian law in a “fair” manner, and how international law has woefully failed to keep up with the realities of modern warfare and terrorism.

Read the whole thing.