UPDATE Afghanistan Special: McChrystal and the Trashing of the President (US Military v. Obama, Chapter 472)

UPDATE 1945 GMT: So who is defending General McChrystal? Well, let's go to Kabul for a statement from a spokesman: "[Hamid Karzai] strongly supports McChrystal and his strategy in Afghanistan and believes he is the best commander the United States has sent to Afghanistan over the last nine years."

UPDATE 1830 GMT: Thumbs Down from the White House? Or Just a Bit of Posturing?

The stingers from the statement of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, "All options are on the table [including McChrystal's resignation]....The magnitude and graveness of the mistake here are profound.”

Afghanistan Document: The McChrystal Profile (Hastings — Rolling Stone)

Gibbs said he gave an advance copy of the article, which had already gone out to the press, to Obama last night. The President was "irked".

Gibbs said the president wants to know “what in the world he was thinking.”

And here's Secretary of Defense Gates' careful statement:

I read with concern the profile piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming edition of ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine. I believe that Gen. McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case. We are fighting a war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies, who directly threaten the United States, Afghanistan, and our friends and allies around the world. Going forward, we must pursue this mission with a unity of purpose. Our troops and coalition partners are making extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our security, and our singular focus must be on supporting them and succeeding in Afghanistan without such distractions. Gen. McChrystal has apologized to me and is similarly reaching out to others named in this article to apologize to them as well. I have recalled Gen. McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person.

UPDATE 1740 GMT: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has issued a far-from-robust defence of General McChrystal. He expressed "concern" over the "significant" mistake of the Rolling Stone interview.

McChrystal also may have lost the backing of key Senators like former Presidential candidate John McCain former Vice Presidential candidate Joseph , ieberman, and Lindsay Graham, who called the General's remarks "inappropriate, inconsistent with relationship between the Commander-in-Chief and the military".

UPDATE 1450 GMT: The executive editor of Rolling Stone says that General McChrystal was shown the advance copy of the profile and raised no objections.

UPDATE 1230 GMT: Department of Defense officials say General McChrystal has fired a press aide over the Rolling Stone episode.

The US Embassy in Afghanistan, despite the military's ridicule of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, has maintained that Eikenberry and General McChrystal "are both fully committed" to President Obama's Afghan strategy and are working together to "implement" the plan.

UPDATE 1200 GMT: Five minutes after posting this, with the projection of a "quick cover-up" of the episode: "Top administration official says McChrystal has personally called Vice President Biden, [Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff] Mullen, [Secretary of Defense] Gates, and NSC advisor Jones to apologize."

In the first week of Barack Obama's Presidency, we noted that his senior military commanders were trying to alter his policies in key areas, to the point of undermining him. We noted their opposition to his plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and his timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and their determination to escalate the military intervention in Afghanistan.

That challenge has continued for almost 18 months with Obama --- in my view --- getting "rolled over" on the Afghanistan issue as he twice conceded to the demands for troop escalation.

That is the background to today's hot media story. Rolling Stone magazine has released advance copies of an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan. The soundbites are so explosive that McChrystal has already issued his "sincerest apology" for "a mistake reflecting poor judgement". He is flying back to Washington, reportedly for a meeting with the President.

All very dramatic. It's far from surprising, however: if this is to be more than a shiny bauble for the media, McChrystal's interview --- when it is released in full on Friday --- will need to be considered as far from "a mistake". It is part of the ongoing military contest with Obama.

Consider the soundbites from the advance copies of the interview.

1. Taking on the President. McChrystal and an aide refer to a 2009 meeting with Obama. The aide belittles the President for "a 10-minute photo op": "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged. The boss was pretty disappointed."

Gen McChrystal says, "I found that time painful. I was selling an unsellable position."

Hmm... McChrystal's pain smacks of a self-serving "poor me" pose. His supposed weariness over the "unsellable" is a bit ironic, given that McChrystal's visit was quite likely the ultimate in sales jobs: he was pitching for the increase in troop deployments that Obama granted in December.

2. Dismissing the Vice-President. Joe Biden may have tried to assert his authority with personal visits to Afghanistan but this snapshot from Rolling Stone portrays a military smacking his annoyance aside.

"Are you asking about Vice-President Biden?" McChrystal asks. 'Who's that?"

An aide then says: "Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?"

3. Trampling on the Ambassador. One of the high-profile episodes in that battle occurred last autumn, when a memorandum from the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry (a retired General), was leaked. It questioned the drive for military escalation, given fundamental political problems and corruption in Afghanistan.

McChrystal's considered reaction? "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before. Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so'."

4. Dismissing the Advisors. Last August, in an effort to check the military's drive for more troops, National Security Advisor James Jones --- another former General --- went to Kabul and warned commanders that, if they pushed for escalation so soon after March's build-up of forces, Obama would ask, "WTF [What the F***]?"

The view of Jones from McChrystal's aide? "A clown stuck in 1985".

And here's the respect that Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, gets. Told of an incoming message, McChrystal says: "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke....I don't even want to open it."

Only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it appears, gets approval from McChrystal's staff.

Now, a lot of this might be put down to day-to-day tensions in the difficult environment of Afghanistan. But --- and this is the point that seems to be eluding the media so far --- these examples of anger, impertinence, disrespect, and near-subversion of the President's authority did not occur in the heat of the moment.

They were offered, after the event, to a reporter as the "real" impressions of senior members of the US military.

That's not frustration. That's a deliberate challenge, in an ongoing campaign to challenge, to the President.

As McChrystal flies to Washington, possibly for a quick cover-up of the episode by all concerned, it needs to be remembered as such. For deliberate challenges do not suddenly evaporate.

UPDATED Afghanistan Document: The McChrystal Profile (Hastings --- Rolling Stone)

Michael Hastings writes for Rolling Stone:

"How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies –-- to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops.

Afghanistan Special: McChrystal’s Interview and the Trashing of the President (US Military v. Obama, Chapter 472)

McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. “Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?”

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center.

The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel’s thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications.

Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual –-- blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks –-- McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the “most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine.” The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too “Gucci”. He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon’s most secretive
black ops.

“What’s the update on the Kandahar bombing?” McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general’s assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

“We have two KIAs, but that hasn’t been confirmed,” Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

“Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”

With that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.”

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan.” The remarks earned him a smackdown from the President himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile.

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. “I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” he says.

Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the Vice President with a good one-liner.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”....

Read rest of article....

Afghanistan's New Propaganda Scam: Poor Afghans, They're Rich! (Mull)

Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. He also writes at Rethink Afghanistan:

By now everyone has just about lost their damn minds about this New York Times article detailing Afghanistan's "discovery" of vast amounts of mineral wealth. Yes, it's way crazy old information (like 1970s old). Yes, it's Soviet Pentagon propaganda. As regular readers know, the International Security Assistance Force's counter-insurgency strategy is a flaming wreck, and you can guess what they're going to do about that, including with propaganda and misinformation.

Afghanistan Special: New Report on Pakistan’s Intelligence Links with Insurgents (Waldman)

But if your reaction has been typical, that of only sneering derision and snide condescension (guilty!), you've missed the point. Part of understanding propaganda is knowing its intended audience. We do this automatically when, say, Iranian President Ahmadinejad blames evil CIA spies for whatever it is that's bothering him that day: unemployment, tummy ache, whatever. We understand right away that this is not about us, about Americans. Rather, it's aimed at a domestic Iranian audience with very real fears about foreign interference. Only in the case of Afghanistan's minerals, we're personalizing it, assuming it's aimed at us. It's not for you, though. This propaganda has a very specific audience, and so far it's working perfectly.

Steve Hynd picks up on the scheme [emphasis mine]:

However, guaranteed U.S. access to "strategic reserves" of "strategic minerals", where possession is nine tenths of the game and the resources are just as valuable still in the ground as mined and processed for market, is a heady brew to mostly-hawkish senior policymakers and Very Serious think-tankers, especially if the end of the sentence goes 'and China doesn't get them". Risen's stenography isn't aimed at us, but at them and will be used to add some geopolitical weight to the arguements McChrystal and others are already beginning to make as to why they should be allowed to break their promise to Obama and the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan a few years longer.

This story is aimed at the elites who make the wars. The Pentagon has handed the hawks in Washington a powerful factoid to be used and re-used endlessly in pursuit of their war.

How do we know this? Well, there are some very obvious clues. The article is loaded with crunchy, fact-y bits that appear substantive, but in reality have nothing to do with what's actually at stake. Does it matter that they have rare-earth minerals and lithium for laptops and so on? No, it doesn't matter if they struck the mother lode of chocolate ice cream. As Blake Hounsel writes, they don't even have concrete, much less a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar mining industry capable of extracting, processing, and marketing these minerals to international companies. They want it to look like a lot of information ("Wow, lookit all the minerals!") but not actually answer any real questions ("Wait, can they even get it?").

Think-tankers love this kind of crap. They'd like nothing better than to somehow fit counter-insurgency and iPads (like most in the media, they're commercial shills for both) into the same article. If you like your Macbook and your Prius and that application that makes your telephone fart, well, you'd better support our batshit crazy idea of invading and bombing Afghan into a peaceful democracy. Otherwise the Chinese will steal all of that copper, and they don't give us anything (except everything).

But it's better than that. You also have gems like this:

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

Neato, it's just like Tom Clancy! Soviet resource wars, hidden documents - it's all so exciting. And it even contains the secret weapon that bleeds the heart of every think-tanker and foreign policy wonk everywhere: the courageous, pro-American snitch. God bless you for "protecting" information that everybody already knew, "small group of Afghan geologists." And thank you, thank you, for keeping it a secret during your darkest eras and revealing it only when the American invaders arrived. I can only assume all Afghans are just as grateful for your selfish attempt at stifling development as we are!

We love to imagine the brown people we're obliterating with missiles secretly know of our righteousness, deep down on the inside. Oh, that smart local, he secretly knows we're the good guys! If you've ever read Richard Clarke's epic, high fantasy novel Scorpion's Gate, you already know this character. In it, a Saudi oil prince secretly falls in love with American democracy and carries out a coup, pretty much turning Saudi Arabia into Switzerland overnight. Of course, this is about as believable as some old, white Tea Partier in Oklahoma secretly reading the Hadith and the collected works of Sayyid Qutb in his basement, but whatever, foreign policy hawks never get tired of fetishing their own pet locals. Those Afghans know the truth, we're the good guys!

Now that we're clear who this propaganda about Afghanistan's minerals is aimed at, is it working? See for yourself:

in emerging and underdeveloped states, weak legal systems and official corruption create incentives for powerful people to exploit those resources, rather than allow mineral wealth to fuel national renewal. Think Congo or Sierra Leone. It’s easy to tick off the ways in which what political scientists call the “Resource Curse” applies to Afghanistan: a tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption throughout the political system; an uneasy and unstable relationship between provincial and national authorities; and an uneasy and unstable relationship in provinces and districts with instruments of local governance as well as national governance.

Yay, the "Resource Curse." It's one of those well-intentioned western excuses, dripping with irony and ignorance, used to insult other countries and hopefully justify a reason to bomb them. The sales pitch goes something like this: "Why, hold up there Ira---, er, Afghanistan. Looks like you got a case of the failed state. Yessir, on account of the resource curse, that is. Luckily, we can sell you the cure! Y'see, it's called counter-insurgency..."

But there's a couple problems with this. Right away, it's not a "curse". A curse implies that it's somehow mystical, a supernatural affliction. Turning into Dracula is a curse. Discovering vast mineral wealth is not a curse.

It's not a magical mystery why Afghanistan, or any other country, suffers from this so-called curse. Ackerman was quite clear: "tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption". Well gee whiz, how do you suppose that stuff happened? Foreign intervention? War? Are we so stupid that we don't realize what we're saying? War is a deliberate policy we choose, we fund, and we carry out. It's not "oops, I guess Afghanistan is cursed." We did that.

But this obliviousness is also where we see the exact impact of the mineral propaganda. This isn't "pro-war" propaganda so much as it is feeding excuses for why the war is failing. A failing war simply implies more war as icing on the cake. Remember, you can never blame the COIN strategy, it is sacred. But you can blame everything else, including Afghanistan itself. Andrew Exum spells it out for us:

But counterinsurgency strategies rest on the assumption that you can eventually weaken anti-government forces and reduce levels of violence to the point where a political process can take place in more peaceful circumstances. We now have one trillion fresh reasons why this assumption might not be valid for Afghanistan. I am not yet sure what this means for either U.S. and allied interests or the current strategy. I more or less agree with today's editorial in the New York Times that our current strategy "still seems like the best chance to stabilize Afghanistan and get American troops home". But as the editorial noted, the news last week from Afghanistan was terrible. And I'm not sure this week's news is any better.

Got that? COIN isn't the problem, no, that's our "best chance." The problem is how crappy Afghanistan is, and now they have "one trillion fresh reasons" to fight about something. Damn those ingrate Afghans, always wanting an equitable stake in their country's resources. We're just trying to move in with guns and bombs and dominate their wealth for our narrow corporate interests, you'd think they'd be nicer about it. If only their crooked government that we support wasn't so corrupt and incompetent, like President Obama and his friends from Goldman Sachs.

See, Afghanistan is war torn, so that's why our war isn't working. Clearly the solution is more war. Voila! Resource Curse!

As we see, this isn't some every day propaganda trying pitifully to sell a trillion dollar debt-war to a nation of unemployed. This is a very specific talking point explicitly targeting the foreign policy community, all as a part of the Pentagon's blame game. It makes the Pentagon appear desperate, sure, but this isn't a joke, some embarassing gaffe by the PR department.

This is very real and very effective military propaganda. Blame everything, blame the Afghans, blame their lithium, just please don't blame the war.

Afghanistan: What Happens When Our Allies "Do More"? (Mull)

EA correspondent Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. He also writes at Rethink Afghanistan:

If you've been following the recent military operations in Helmand and Kandahar, you've likely noticed that it's been something of an unmitigated disaster. And not just a disaster in the sense that most of our military efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been disasters, this is the make-or-break moment for the US counterinsurgency strategy. My colleague Derrick Crowe writes:

No reporter should let Secretary Gates, General McChrystal, or President Obama off the hook in the coming months regarding the make-or-break nature of the Kandahar operation for their (poorly) chosen COIN strategy in Afghanistan. As described in the report to Congress, Kandahar/Helmand is the main effort, and everything else is either a “shaping,” “supporting,” or “economy of force (read: leftovers)” operation. Kandahar/Helmand is the COIN strategy. If ISAF fails there, it fails, period.

Fail there, fail everywhere. Couldn't be any more clear than that. And that's not his characterization, he's citing the people in charge. Derrick then offers some advice:

Members of Congress considering funding the ongoing Kandahar/Helmand/escalation strategy should read these comments from Secretary Gates with alarm. He’s hedging and trying to set expectations because he knows the COIN effort is in serious, “bleeding ulcer” trouble. Congress should save us all a whole lot of trouble and vote against the $33 billion war spending supplemental under consideration.

Right, when you pressure your representative to block the funding, they need to be made fully aware that our strategy is broken and ruinous. But the problem is that it won't be that easy. Politicians can be very slippery, even the ones we like, and they'll try to shift the blame on to someone else. "No, it's not the strategy," they'll say, "it's our allies. Our allies need to do more."

The folks on Capitol Hill are big believers in Counterinsurgency doctrine, and as we've seen, COIN is not a doctrine, but an ideology that can never be proven or dis-proven. Communism isn't the problem, it's "human nature" that fails. Conservatism can't fail, only you can fail to be conservative. And our COIN strategy can't fail, it has to be the fault of our allies.

But that's wrong. Our allies have been doing more, a lot more. NATO,  Afghan President Karzai, and Pakistan have all been participating in President Obama's escalation strategy, and that is only making the problem worse. If we see what it is our allies are actually doing, we'll find that the COIN defenders are wrong. Our counterinsurgency strategy, the idea that occupation and war have anything remotely to do with stabilizing and developing a nation, is the problem. The US will try to shift the blame onto our allies, but as we'll see, Derrick is right: it's our war that is the problem.

We'll start with our friends in NATO, Canada. We've talked about the new Canadian strategy before, but their "signature project" is especially important to note. They're working on a huge water distribution system in Kandahar province, and if completed, could provide a sustainable development for Afghans to maintain and operate on their own without Western assistance, that supposedly being the overarching goal of our mission in Afghanistan. However, the project has hit a bit of snag [emphasis mine]:

The $50-million Dahla Dam irrigation project, touted as Canada’s best chance for a lasting legacy in Afghanistan, has all but stalled as its lead contractor, a partnership involving the Canadian engineering giant SNC Lavalin, battles for control against a sometimes violent Afghan security firm widely believed to be loyal to Afghanistan’s ruling Karzai family, insiders close to the project say.[...]

Foremost among the setbacks, insiders say, was a dramatic confrontation on Feb. 20, when rising tensions between Canadian security officials hired to oversee the project and members of Watan Risk Management, a group of Afghan mercenaries with close ties to the Karzai family, culminated in a “Mexican standoff” — the guns hired to protect the project actually turned on each other in a hair-trigger confrontation.[...]

“Ever since, the project has been basically held hostage by the Karzai mafia, who are using ‘security concerns’ to stall the work. They are able to put fear in the heart of the Canadian contractors, telling them ‘There is evil outside the gates that will eat you.’ The longer they delay, the more money the Afghan security teams make. The Canadians have good intentions but that is the reality.”

Oops, it looks like the Canadians tried to do more and accidentally bumped into another one of our allies, President Karzai. He's got militia in Kandahar busily working on another part of our COIN strategy, extending the control of the central Kabul government, the "Host Nation" as it's called.

Only Karzai is a criminal with no legitimacy, so he has to extend central government control the only way you can expand an illegitimate, criminal enterprise: violence, intimidation, coercion, all are in play here. Karzai is also desperately dependent on western welfare, so if he expects to remain in power, he'll need to drag out western development projects as long as he possibly can. If "security concerns" will delay a project, then you make your own if you have to. Our strategy requires him to expand his mafia empire; what else is he supposed to do?

And what about the Pakistani military? Our politicians are constantly whining for them to do more for our awful strategy. Well, they are doing more. Here's what that looks like:

"I lost my sense when I reached the door of my house and saw and heard the crying of my close neighbors and relatives--as if hell fell on me. When I saw people putting the dead bodies of my children, parents, and other relatives in bed I couldn't bear it anymore and fell on the ground..."

- A 25-year-old man who lost nine family members when two shells fired by security forces hit his house during the battle of Loi Sam (FATA).

Nice job "protecting the civilian population" there by the Pakistani army --- those innocent women and children will never again be threatened by the Taliban. And the army's "doing more" has the same results as the US "population-centric" strategy of killing civilians by the houseful across the border in Afghanistan. The military assaults legitimize the insurgency and turn the population against the government. That works out great for the other part of our strategy, showering Pakistan's military dictatorship with money and weapons.

Pakistan's army supports the Taliban as "strategic depth" in its war with India. As long as the Taliban are empowered by US and Pakistani military assaults, they survive to be used against India in proxy wars spanning Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Kashmir, and really most of the sub-continent. And as long as those extremist militants are there to threaten, the US has an excuse to give Pakistan...tada! Money and weapons to use in military assaults in the tribal regions. See how this works? Our allies in the Pakistani military are working our COIN strategy with everything they've got, and it's going great for them. Want Pakistan to do more? Gladly.

Our allies are working hard. Canada, one of our last friends in NATO, took our notion of development seriously and are replacing their military with aid projects. But Karzai is also working hard to extend the authority of the host nation, and that requires him to derail development in favor if violence, insecurity, and criminality. Pakistan's army is also working hard to clear its tribal area sanctuaries, so the Taliban can be safe elsewhere to engage in proxy war with India, and that includes in Afghanistan. And then we're back at the beginning, with the US then escalating its occupation to fight the Taliban.

The problem is not NATO, Karzai, or Pakistan. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. You might reason that Karzai and Pakistan's military despots aren't good choices for allies, but that misses the point. They are the strategy. And that strategy is the problem, not action or lack of action from our allies.

You're going to see this meme more and more in the coming weeks and months. As we see from Derrick's reporting, the military is well aware that it's failing big time in Afghanistan. So rather than admitting our COIN strategy is a flaming wreck, look for the blame to fall on our allies. Folks who talk about the relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan will be elevated, so look forward to [re-]learning old factoids such as that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence  helped create the Taliban and so forth. The White House will continue to pretend to be outraged and confused with Karzai, even though they know full well he's corrupt and illegitimate. And of course, the US will continue to gripe that NATO allies won't send more troops, even though it's the non-military development projects that work.

Don't fall for it. You can demand that Congress block any more funding for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cut off the COIN strategy at its source, the money. You can demand that congress abandon Karzai and push for free and fair elections in Afghanistan, so that the central government has legitimacy. You can demand that the US engage with and empower the elected civilian government of Pakistan, rather than  its military despots like General Kiyani. And you can demand they support non-military projects like our allies, Canada. Don't let them get away with pushing the blame off.

The problem lies squarely with the US war.

The US and The World: Pentagon Creates Office for International Legitimacy (Ackerman)

Spencer Ackerman writes in The Washington Independent:

For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars among some policymakers. And the office’s first test may be its perspective on the thorny questions surrounding how the department handles al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

Announced within the Pentagon in late May, the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy is being led by Rosa Brooks, a senior adviser to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and a former director of Georgetown Law School’s Human Rights Center. It endeavors to ensure that the broad strategic aims of the Obama administration regarding adherence to a rules-based international order don’t get lost in the pressures of military contingencies. It will also advise senior Pentagon officials on their contributions to interagency planning and White House requests for advice on rule-of-law compliance, and will work with Congress and non-governmental organizations focusing on its host of issues.

The office — created by Flournoy with support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and run by a staff that will eventually number 20 people — reflects a recent recognition that the legitimacy of the U.S. military in combat plays its own battlefield role, especially in conflicts like Afghanistan, where perceptions by civilians about whether to support America’s allies or its adversaries are considered decisive. “The counterinsurgency and counterterrorism doctrine has really moved in the direction of saying that these issues are not luxuries,” Brooks explained in a Monday interview at the Pentagon. “These issues are absolutely central to achieving our military objectives in a counterinsurgency or a counterterrorism environment, where the name of the game is ‘Do you have credibility? Do you have legitimacy? Are you building the structures that support long-term stability?’”

Many of the office’s emerging responsibilities will center on entrenching respect for the rule of law and human rights as a core focus within the Defense Department. Previously, Pentagon officials who worked on those issues were spread throughout the policy directorate, in bureaus as disparate as Counternarcotics and Detainee Affairs, a reflection of the secondary — Brooks called it “ad hoc” — treatment the department has traditionally provided to humanitarian concerns. Karen Greenberg, the director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, said the office needs to “restore the notion that the rule of law is there on the table no matter what.” Matthew Waxman, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the end of the Bush administration, added that “sometimes important strategic issues can fall into bureaucratic seams, and redrawing parts of the organizational map can help address that.”

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