Selling the War: NATO's "Master Narrative" for Afghanistan

Update: Wikileaks has now decrypted and released four documents, one of which is the Master Narrative, related to NATO "strategic communications.

I've just learned from a reader of an October 2008 NATO "Master Narrative" for its Media Operations Center. Although it is almost five months ago, some of the "talking points" --- both in terms of policy and propaganda --- are still more than relevant.

Key points include:

1. "Afghanistan remains NATO’s number one priority. This is not an operation of choice, it is one of necessity. We are in Afghanistan for the long term under a United Nations mandate for as long as we are needed and welcomed by the Afghan people."

2. "The Afghan National Security Forces and ISAF are making progress on the ground. The militants* do not and cannot hold ground where they are challenged by ANSF [Afghanistan National Security Forces] and ISAF [International Security Assistance Force]."

*"Opposing Militant Forces" is the correct term but is not suitable for use with the media. Depending on the audience and the group being referred to, the phrases militants/insurgents/extremists/Taleban extremists/enemies of Afghanistan may be used.

3. "NATO has the strategy and forces to succeed over time. If asked: However, we could achieve the mission much faster and more efficiently with more. To that end we are constantly re-assessing the capabilities required to achieve the political goal and to mitigate any shortfalls."

4. "NATO/ISAF fully respects the sovereignty of Pakistan. NATO/ISAF has every right, however, to address issues which might diminish security in Afghanistan, and put its military and civilian personnel at risk.

"Only if pressed: ISAF forces are frequently fired at from inside Pakistan, very close to the border. In some cases defensive fire is required, against specific threats. Wherever possible, such fire is pre-coordinated with the Pakistani military."

5. "Both the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran repeatedly indicated that they will pursue the development of stable and trustful relations.

"Weapons with Iranian markings have been intercepted on Afghan territory. NATO/ISAF has no direct evidence of Iranian government involvement. NATO/ISAF is monitoring the situation."

6. "NOTE: The term 'compensation' is inappropriate and should not be used because it brings with it legal implications that do not apply. ISAF makes every effort to minimise the risk of any damage, injury or loss of life to civilians in the course of its operations in Afghanistan. NATO/ISAF deeply regrets the death or injury of any innocent civilian as a result of its operations."

7. "Jordan has requested not to be mentioned as an ISAF member state in the public domain."

Read the report in full.....

Mr Obama's War: Gareth Porter on the Afghanistan "Mini-Surge"

Gareth Porter, who is emerging as the best observer of the US military manoeuvres on Iraq and Afghanistan, looks behind President Obama's eventual decision to approve only part of the 30,000 extra troops request by US commanders for the Afghan War (Porter says 17,000 sent; we put the figure at just over 20,000). While the President has apparently drawn the line with the military, Porter warns, "Obama now faces the prospect that the Joint Chiefs will renew their support for McKiernan's request for the remaining 13,000 troops next month." And he has an analogy which is just short of terrifying:

Both Obama's decision to agree to just over half of his field commander's request for additional troops and the broader strategic situation offer striking parallels with the decision by President Lyndon B. Johnson in April 1965 to approve 36,000 out of a 49,000 troop request for Vietnam.

 



'What is the End Game?': Why Obama Rejected a Bigger Surge in Afghanistan
Gareth Porter

President Barack Obama decided to approve only 17,000 of the 30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they would be used, according to a White House source.

But Obama is likely to be pressured by McKiernan and the Joint Chiefs to approve the remaining 13,000 troops requested after the completion of an Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review next month.

Obama's decision to approve just over half the full troop request for Afghanistan recalls a similar decision by President Lyndon B. Johnson to approve only part of the request for U.S. troop deployments in a parallel situation in the Vietnam War in April 1965 at a comparable stage of that war. Johnson reluctantly went along with the request for additional troops within weeks under pressure from both the field commander and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The request for 30,000 additional troops, which would bring the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to more than 60,000, had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as by Defense Secretary Robert Gates before Obama's inauguration. A front-page story in the Washington Post Jan. 13 reported that Obama was ready to "sign off" on the deployment request.

On Jan. 30 Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said between 20,000 and 30,000 more troops would "probably" be sent to Afghanistan and the figure would "tend toward the higher number of those two."

But on Feb. 9, Mullen indicated that the Pentagon would soon announce that three brigades, or about 16,000 troops, would be deployed to Afghanistan in the coming months.

What had changed in the nine days between those two statements, according to a White House source, was that Obama had called McKiernan directly and asked how he planned to use the 30,000 troops, but got no coherent answer to the question.

It was after that conversation that Obama withdrew his support for the full request.

The unsatisfactory response from McKiernan had been preceded by another military non-answer to an Obama question. At his meeting with Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon Jan. 28, Obama asked the Joint Chiefs, "What is the end game?" in Afghanistan, and was told, "Frankly, we don't have one," according to a Feb. 4 report by NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.

Obama had also learned by early February that earlier assurances from Petraeus of an accord with Kyrygistan on use of the base at Manas had been premature, and that the U.S. ability to supply troops in Afghanistan would be dependent on political accommodations with Russia and Iran.

The rationale from the military leadership for doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, even without a strategy or a concept of how the war could end, had been to "buy time" for an effort to build up Afghan security forces, as indicated by Mullen's Jan. 30 remarks.

The 17,000 troops, on the other hand, presented the upper limit of what Obama had pledged to add in Afghanistan during the campaign, according to Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, who was an adviser to Obama.

Korb told IPS that Obama's decision not to wait until the key strategic questions were clarified before sending any more troops was based on the belief that he had to signal both Afghans and Pakistanis that the United States was not getting out of Afghanistan, according to Korb. "There are a lot of people in both countries hedging their bets," said Korb.

McKiernan reminded reporters Wednesday that the 17,000 troops represent only about two-thirds of the number of troops he has requested. That complaint suggested that he had been given no assurance that the remainder of the troops would be approved after the policy review.

The Wall Street Journal quoted an administration official Wednesday as saying that the troop authorization addresses the "urgent near-term security needs on the ground," but "does not prejudge or limit the options of what the [Afghanistan] review may recommend when it's completed."

Obama may have become more wary of getting mired down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, despite his strong commitment to increasing troops to Afghanistan during the campaign.

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, on whom Obama has reportedly relied for advice on foreign policy, told Sam Stein of the Huffington Post Wednesday, "We have to decide more precisely what is the objective of our involvement. Because we are increasingly running the risk of getting bogged down both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan in pursuit of objectives which we are lacking the power to reach."

Brezinzski said the administration needed "very specific, narrow objectives".

Korb told IPS that the policy review will deal with political-diplomatic as well as military policy issues, including the option of seeking to incorporate at least elements of the insurgents into the government through negotiations. He recalled that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been advocating negotiations with the Taliban for two years.

Both Obama's decision to agree to just over half of his field commander's request for additional troops and the broader strategic situation offer striking parallels with the decision by President Lyndon B. Johnson in April 1965 to approve 36,000 out of a 49,000 troop request for Vietnam.

Johnson's decision, like Obama's, was made against a background of rapid deterioration in the security situation, worry that the war would soon be lost if more U.S. troops were not deployed, and an unresolved debate over how the troops would be employed in South Vietnam. Some of Johnson's advisers still favored a strategy of protecting the key population centers, whereas the field commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, was calling for a more aggressive strategy of seeking out enemy forces.

Another parallel between the two situations is high-level concern that too many U.S. troops would provoke anti-U.S. sentiment. That was the primary worry of some of Johnson's advisers about the effect of deploying three divisions in South Vietnam.

Similarly, Gates said Dec. 14 he would be "very concerned" about deploying more than the 30,000 troops requested by McKiernan, because, "At a certain point, we get such a big footprint, we begin to look like an occupier." Gates repeated that point in Congressional testimony Jan. 27, in which he again stressed the failure of the Soviet Union with 120,000 troops.

McKiernan, on the other hand, said Wednesday, "There's always an inclination to relate what we're doing with previous nations," he said, adding, "I think that's a very unhealthy comparison."

Johnson was worried about sliding into an open-ended commitment to a war that could not be won. But two months later he gave in, against his better judgment, to a request from Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam, for "urgent reinforcements". The escalation of the war continued for another two years.

Obama now faces the prospect that the Joint Chiefs will renew their support for McKiernan's request for the remaining 13,000 troops next month. And if the full 30,000 troop increase proves to be insufficient, he is likely to face further requests later on for "urgent reinforcements."

Bombing "Sanctuaries", Now and Then: Mr Henry Kissinger

Mr Henry Kissinger, The Washington Post, 26 February 2009:

Pakistan's leaders must face the fact that continued toleration of the sanctuaries -- or continued impotence with respect to them -- will draw their country ever deeper into an international maelstrom.

Mr Henry Kissinger, interview with Die Zeit, Summer 1976:

The fact is that we were bombing North Vietnamese troops that had invaded Cambodia, that were killing many Americans from these sanctuaries, and we were doing it with the acquiescence of the Cambodian government, which never once protested against it, and which, indeed, encouraged us to do it. I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved and why Cambodian neutrality should apply to only one country.

The Walrus, 26 February 2009:

Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

UPDATED: "Taliban": Well, They All Look the Same....

This week Josh Mull ("UJ"), both in his guest blog and in his comments, has offered valuable insight into the complexity of local groups and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I've now discovered an analysis by Steve Hynd ("Cernig"), which I think is an excellent introduction to the political, economic, and social dimensions beyond the label "Taliban". It's reprinted below this report from Al Jazeera:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWT1kqoeszI[/youtube] 

Taliban: What's in a Name?

Two years into the Iraq war, moderately well read Westerners already knew that the insurgency there wasn't monolithic. Honest reporting repeatedly made clear that Al Qaeda, Sunni militant groups of various varieties and Sadrists didn't see eye to eye and often worked at cross purposes even while all were hostile to America and its allies.

Yet after seven years in Afghanistan, the same cannot be said about Western knowledge of militants in the region. There's a big, amorphous mass called "The Taliban" which is in cahoots with Al Qaeda - and that's about as fine grained as it usually gets.


That was sufficient back in 2001. The American-led coalition invaded to engage Osama bin Laden's group and the Taliban's organized fighters and on the battlefield itself Afghans quickly sorted into those who were either Al Qeada or Taliban, or those who were against them.

But it doesn't cover the current complex situation at all well,which means the West's voters are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding - and approving or disapproving - their leaders' plans. As Brandon Friedman, a former officer who served in Afghanistan, put it in a recent email:

Instead of fighting organized theocratic government forces and their foreign terrorist guests, we're now arrayed against a Tatooine-esque combination actual foreign terrorists, actual Taliban fighters from two different countries, narco-warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, regular warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, angry Afghan citizens who've grown weary of civilian casualties, angry Afghan civilians who've grown weary of foreign forces and their broken promises, regular Afghan citizens who side with the Taliban out of sheer necessity for survival, angry opium farmers, Pakistani agents, and, finally, the invisible blight of government corruption.

Reducing that complexity to a simple "Us and Them" formula hinders much of the debate about Afghanistan.

So it was pleasant to see, among coverage of recent US missile strikes, a report by Mark Mazzetti, David Sanger and Eric Schmidt of the New York Times which tried to explain the various flavors of Taliban, their motives and their aims. The piece highlighted the difference between the Taliban group that Pakistan is most interested in opposing, Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which is believed responsible for the campaign against Western forces in Afghanistan.

The latter group thinks the former has no business attacking Pakistani security forces or the Pakistani government, pointing to a reciprocal tension between Pakistan and the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. While the Pakistani government is happy to do peace deals with Haqqani's network and less so with Mehsud's, the coalition is more likely to eventually do so with the latter. Meanwhile, Pakistani counter-terror efforts are always going to focus on Mehsud's groups - which isn't all that useful to the West.

We could do with more of this kind of reporting about the region. In particular, we could do with more differentiation on press reports of the four or five main current strains of Taliban of interest to Western efforts in the region. That's the plea recently made by Frederick Kagan, in a short article for the National Review Online reproduced at the American Enterprise Institute:

There is no such thing as "the Taliban" today. Many different groups with different leaders and aims call themselves "Taliban," and many more are called "Taliban" by their enemies. In addition to Mullah Omar's Taliban based in Pakistan and indigenous Taliban forces in Afghanistan, there is an indigenous Pakistani Taliban controlled by Baitullah Mehsud (this group is thought to have been responsible for assassinating Benazir Bhutto). Both are linked with al-Qaeda, and both are dangerous and determined. In other areas, however, "Taliban" groups are primarily disaffected tribesmen who find it more convenient to get help from the Taliban than from other sources.

In general terms, any group that calls itself "Taliban" is identifying itself as against the government in Kabul, the U.S., and U.S. allies. Our job is to understand which groups are truly dangerous, which are irreconcilable with our goals for Afghanistan--and which can be fractured or persuaded to rejoin the Afghan polity. We can't fight them all, and we can't negotiate with them all. Dropping the term "Taliban" and referring to specific groups instead would be a good way to start understanding who is really causing problems.

Mullah Omar's Taliban - the original Afghanistan-ruling Taliban - is nowadays more under the day-to-day direction of Mullah Bradar (or Brehadar), Omar's trusted chief of military operations but it still leans heavily towards the position of Jalaluddin Haqqani's Taliban, which has largely supplanted it as the pre-eminent force in Afghanistan. Both are based in Pakistan but mostly interested in attacking allied forces in Afghanistan and the Afghan government. As one prominent member of Omar's group told Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad last September:

It is necessary to understand that there is a sea of difference between the people who call themselves the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban [led by Mehsud] and the Taliban. We have nothing to do with them. In fact, we oppose the policies they adhere to against the Pakistani security forces.

We individually speak to all groups, whether they are Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Arabs, Uzbeks or whosoever, telling them not to create violence in Pakistan, especially in the name of the Taliban.

Journalists in the West could do worse than refer to veteran reporter Anand Gopal's incisive look at the various competing groups of militants in the region, which also include the resurgent Hizb-i-Islami of charismatic fundamentalist Hekmatyar, who like Haqqani used to be one of those favored by both CIA and ISI intelligence agencies. Gopal writes of a "rainbow coalition" arrayed against U.S. troops, which is "competing commanders with differing ideologies and strategies, who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners."

As Brandon Freidman writes, it's tempting to default to the soundbite term "Taliban" when talking about all these groups and to thus treat them as if they were one monolithic structure. But a more nuanced debate is not only healthy in any democracy, it might pave the way for Western public acceptance of what every military commander has said must eventually happen if there is ever to be real peace - an accord with more moderate groups to reconcile them to mainstream Afghan and Pakistani politics.

UPDATED: Mr Obama's War: Show Me the Money....

Update: Read closely, because this may be much worse than we reported. According to CNN, Obama is seeking $200 billion in supplementary money for the rest of Fiscal Year 2009: $75.5 billion to cover the cost of additional troop deployments and $130 billion in general funds. That is in addition to the $65 billion authorised by Congress for the first half of Fiscal Year 2009. So the grand total, if this is true, is a $265 billion top-up to the $534 billion Pentagon budget --- an effective 50% increase in expenditure.

Bloomberg reports, "President Barack Obama will seek $75.5 billion more for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of this fiscal year, according to three people familiar with the request." That makes a total "supplement" of $130 billion in addition to the $534 billion defense budget being sent to Congress today.

Just to recap: the supplementary funds --- $65 billion has already been approved by Congress --- about one-sixth of the $790 economic stimulus package that was signed by Obama this week after heated and sometimes bitter debate over the "pork" in the funding request.

Somehow I don't think Obama's request for war money will get the same kind of criticism. Indeed, if there's any sniping about it, it will be that the request is too low. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants even more money, and the President's total is at the "low end" of the Pentagon's credit-card application for an additional $130 to $140 billion.

Maybe more importantly, I'm betting that no one in Congress --- and possibly no one in the media --- joins the dots between this request and the little matter of the Federal budget deficit. You know, the one which will easily top $1 trillion next year.

So, for all those who think the real contest for national strength is economic rather than military: Sit Down. Shut Up. And the next time that Tom Friedman warbles in the New York Times about how China and India (whom I don't think are diverting quite so much into fighting wars rather than economic development) and some other country that we used to dominate is "taking over", just Look Away.