Iran: Why the US Sanctions Game on Tehran is All Wrong

Gary Sick, an official in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan Administrations and now a professor at Columbia University, was a key participant earlier this month in a Harvard University simulation of US-Iran relations. His conclusion, published in The National: "Is the United States really going to proceed with Iran on the basis of a sanctions policy that has consistently failed? One hopes that the Obama administration can demonstrate more imagination and agility than its Harvard namesakes."

(David Ignatius also has a column on the event: "The simulated world of December 2010 looks ragged and dangerous. If the real players truly mean to contain Iran and stop it from getting the bomb, they need to avoid the snares that were so evident in the Harvard game."):

Can the United States forge a mutually constructive relationship with Iran? Can a global superpower find a way to persuade a recalcitrant and paranoid regional power to enter the community of nations as a responsible participant?

Iran: US State Department Pushes for “Proper” Sanctions in 2010
The Latest on Iran (16 December): What’s Next?

For 30 years, both America and Iran have answered those questions with a resounding no. The United States has historically taken a coercive approach, which has only driven Iran further into petulant isolation.

The Obama presidency promised a different strategy.

Rather than indulging in extravagant Axis-of-Evil invective, which even the outgoing Bush administration had come to regard as counter-productive, the United States would cool the rhetoric and extend a hand. That policy was only four months old in June, when Iran descended into its most excruciating domestic crisis since the civil war in the early 1980s. The resulting loss of legitimacy by the ruling elites and their utter preoccupation with their own survival meant that foreign policy decisions – always difficult at best – were now subject to a new set of internal dynamics and uncertainties.

Despite these new complications, Iran’s national security leadership accepted and even promoted an agreement with the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany) for a swap of nuclear material. Iran would relinquish a sizable proportion of its stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU), which would be further enriched by Russia and then fashioned into fuel cells by France to supply the Tehran Research Reactor. Both sides regarded this as a win-win agreement and an important step towards further negotiations.

But the proposal met a chorus of disapproval from Iran’s parliament and even the “Green” opposition, who argued that Iran should not give up a “national asset” – the uranium – without absolute assurances that the P5+1 would fulfill their end of the bargain. Iran’s leaders were forced to propose an alternative arrangement: that the swap take place inside Iran.

At that point, the United States and its partners could have responded with a counter-offer that would, for example, sequester the Iranian LEU under strict safeguards until the replacement fuel cells were available, thus accomplishing most, if not all, of their original objectives. Instead, they ended all negotiations and introduced a sharply critical resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency board.

Iran predictably responded by declaring it would reduce its cooperation with the IAEA and, in a fit of blustery indignation, announcing a new plan to build 10 additional enrichment sites – a hollow threat since Iran lacked both the centrifuges and the necessary raw uranium fuel to carry it out.

Iran withdrew into its cocoon of haughty and pained victimization. The United States and its allies made a similar retreat to a posture of righteous indignation, the better to fashion “crippling” sanctions designed to force Iran to change its policies.

This sequence of events suggested that the future of interactions between the United States and Iran under Barack Obama might not look so different from his predecessors. A recent experience convinces me that such a conclusion may not be entirely fanciful.

Last week I participated in a simulation game at Harvard University’s Belfer Center focused on US-Iran relations. About half a dozen countries or entities (including the EU and the GCC) were represented by teams of participants, many of whom had long years of experience in regional politics. For my sins, I was made the head of the Iran team.

The goal of the American team was to assemble a consensus for new sanctions against Iran. The Iran team, on the other hand, felt confident that the US and its allies could not put together a package that would hurt us in any serious way, and that was indeed the case. By the end of the game, the Americans had driven away all their ostensible allies, and wasted immense time and effort, while Iran was better off than it had been at the beginning.

This was only a simulation, of course. But the moves of the US team were quite similar to the strategy actually employed by the United States over the course of the past three administrations. The pursuit of sanctions in this game, as in the real world, became an end in itself, with little impact on Iran or its ability to continue enrichment. The United States can (and in fact already has) put together a reasonable set of sanctions. These efforts may please the Israelis, the GCC states and other allies as a show of determination. But will they stop Iran?

Those of us on the Iran team scarcely paid any attention to all this massive US policy exertion. Admittedly, we felt lonely at times. But we never believed that our core objectives (freedom to proceed with our nuclear plans and our growing appetite for domestic political repression) were at risk – nor was the survival of our rather peculiar regime, which was of course our most immediate concern.

The offers made by the Iran team were modest in the extreme, yet they formed the basis of the final outcome. No other country had the courage or imagination to remind us of the earlier proposals and suggestions we had made, which were still on the table, nor did they try to sit us down and push us on our plans, or give us a juicy incentive that might have forced us to make real decisions. Also, no one attempted to broaden the discussion to other areas where the United States and Iran share some common interests and might have found common ground.

It was probably realistic that no one challenged Iran’s right to enrich. That has reluctantly been accepted as a fait accompli. But there was no effort to test Iran on safeguards, inspections or other arrangements that might provide reliable intelligence on Iranian activities; neither did any player propose restrictions on specific key elements of the Iranian nuclear program, which would lengthen the time required to break out into production of a nuclear device.

By the end of the game, Russia and China had initiated their own secret accommodation with Iran. That was an interesting development, but one that was by no means inevitable. It happened because of the single-minded pressure of the US team, who demanded support for a sanctions regime that was fundamentally contrary to Russian and Chinese interests.

Relations between the United States and Iran have always been more about domestic politics than foreign policy. That has never been truer than it is today.

For years, the United States attempted to isolate and contain Iran, without much success. Now Iran is isolating itself. A self-imposed “iron curtain” is descending around the country. Communications are subject to surveillance and punishment. Travel increasingly tends to be one way, as individuals decide to leave the country to “cool off” in the face of constant repression or simply to find decent jobs. “Commissars” are being placed in schools and universities to insure that teaching is in accordance with approved dogma according to the Revolutionary Guard. The basij, a popular paramilitary force, is increasingly being used for street enforcement, in place of the less-ideological police.

In the words of Charles Issawi, “Revolutions revolve – 360 degrees.” The leaders of the Iranian revolution are seemingly not content with merely imitating the tyrant that they so proudly overthrew 30 years ago. Instead they have gone even further, and now emulate the crude dictatorship of Saddam Hussein that is an insult to sophisticated Iranian culture. Iran is taking its place among those governments that are incompetent in all things except the repression of their own people.

The slow motion coup that is underway in Iran, with the Revolutionary Guard inserting itself into the very fabric of the state and economy, greatly complicates but does not prevent negotiation of important issues, including nuclear enrichment and human rights. Such an effort, however, requires patience and perseverance – qualities that come hard to American policy makers. Yet the United States negotiated a nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union while also negotiating the Helsinki Accords, which gave birth to the modern human rights movement and empowered opponents of Soviet rule.

Is the United States really going to proceed with Iran on the basis of a sanctions policy that has consistently failed? One hopes that the Obama administration can demonstrate more imagination and agility than its Harvard namesakes.

Afghanistan: The 9 Surges of Mr Obama's War

Tom Englehardt, writing at TomDispatch, goes beyond the headline "30,000 extra troops" of President Obama's recent announcement to detail the extent of the US escalation and long-term commitment --- despite Obama's initial declaration of a "beginning to the end" of the military presence in July 2011 --- to the intervention in Afghanistan (N.B.: All links in original article):

In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.

A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War

Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media's focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway.

In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together.

What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends. Think of this as an effort to widen our view of Obama’s widening war.

Obama’s Nine Surges

1. The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced.

First of all, they represent Obama’s surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. Last week, when he spoke, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the March announcement, however, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already underway when Obama arrived.

It also looks like at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door in recent months without notice or comment. Similarly, with the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told De Young “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”

Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.

2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were increasing in a void. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many former military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases. There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play any part in the president’s three months of deliberations? Does he have any control over how many contractors are put on the U.S. government payroll there? We don’t know.

Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major pieces on the president’s tortuous “deliberations” with his key military and civilian advisors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all produced from copious officially inspired leaks, there wasn't a single mention of private contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging for months.

A modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after the president’s speech gave us the basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” the piece barely peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper. According to Cole: “The Defense Department's latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40% between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same period... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total...” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.

Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”

3. The Militia Surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Awakening Movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we'll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.

This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”

4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a “civilian surge” underway in Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by “the early weeks of next year.” (Of course, that, in turn, means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for a humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.

5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right recently when, considering the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point.” In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.”

In addition, Scott Shane of the [New York] Times reports:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said..., to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time -- a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas -- because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a hornet’s nest with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.

6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama's latest troop-surge announcement. A recent NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which -- especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades underway at the moment -- are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.

In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward observation bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote in early November, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military's building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”

7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan national army and police. Despite years of American and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions -- 25% of those trained in the last year are now gone -- and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan Army and more than $10 billion has gone into police training -- staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country's security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just suggested that it will take at least 15-20 years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”); in this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. (And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.)

9. The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his speech, in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months from now. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline says it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of promises (“…and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011”). Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful.

In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“...July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [National Security Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’”)

How Wide the Widening War?

When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seems a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency -- Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s population -- and the insurgents are a relatively lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a minuscule numberof al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has, to the best of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan.

All of this has been underway for close to a year, with at least another six months to go. This is the reality that the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people in that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows, or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a reality we should grasp as we consider our future and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.

And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what looks to be a widening war in the region. Already, the Obama administration has been issuing ever stronger warnings to the Pakistani government and military to shape up in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan, but cross-border raids by Special Operations types, and even possibly “hot pursuit” by U.S. forces into Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.

As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, wrote recently, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the American ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

A Hail Mary Strategy in Pakistan: The Gut Reaction to Obama's Speech (Part 2)

On Wednesday in Holland, I was set a challenge by a member of the audience: could I summarise, in 30 seconds, the Pakistan side of President Obama's Tuesday speech setting out US intervention in that country as well as Afghanistan?

Here goes....

In American football, there is a desperation play called the Hail Mary pass. You're behind 4 points and there are only 5 seconds left on the clock. So you hurl the football 60, 70, 80 yards down the field and hope against hope that one of your receivers can something snatch it for 6 points and an unlikely victory.

Josh Shahryar’s Afghanistan Primer: The US and the "Warlords"
Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan
A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)

Kill Bin Laden: this is President Obama's Hail Mary.

Of course, the President didn't use that exact expression, preferring general rhetoric with little substance about "an effective partnership with Pakistan". Instead, his advisors left breadcrumbs for more observant journalists to follow, as in this extract from Wednesday's New York Times:

Administration officials said that Mr. Obama had signed off on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency to expand C.I.A. activities in Pakistan. The plan calls for more strikes against militants by drone aircraft, sending additional spies to Pakistan, and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.

The expanded operations could include drone strikes in the southern province of Baluchistan, where senior Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, officials said.

There's no mention of Osama or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but then again this is not a new strategy. The US has been pursuing the drone strikes, supported by covert ground operations, for years; the only difference since January 2009 has been that President Obama has expanded the effort. This autumn the Administration has been spinning that the attacks killed at least seven top "extremists" (take your pick with the generic label, "Taliban" or "Al Qa'eda"), including Baitullah Mehsud.

Which raises an immediate question: where do you go from there with yet another "expansion"? I guess you hope that you can rub out Mehsud's relative and successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, who popped up alive weeks after US sources said he was most likely dead, and any other claimants of leadership.

But let's assume that the super-effective drones can eliminate most of the local Pakistani insurgent leaders. Let's assume that there is not a "hydra effect", in which you assassinate one senior member only for another two to pop up. Let's even assume that you don't have the inconvenience of eliminating dozens of civilian bystanders, as has happened frequently during the drone campaign.

Here's the problem for the US Government: is this all there is? A possible answer would be no, since in Obama's words, "The Pakistani army has waged an offensive in Swat and South Waziristan."

Well, yes, there has been an offensive in the summer and autumn which has pushed insurgents deeper into the country. It has also displaced millions --- not thousands, hundreds of thousands, but millions --- of Pakistanis from their homes (a minor blip that Obama wished away on Tuesday with, "We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting"). It has diverted Pakistani resources, at a time of serious economic difficulty, a diversion which the US Government hopes can be covered by its aid package "to support Pakistan's democracy and development".

This is not a strategy beyond Whack-a-Mole and hope he doesn't pop up again. So is there all there is?

Maybe not, in the sense --- unspoken by Obama on Tuesday --- that his Administration is hoping to back a political centre in Islamabad that will be more stable than that in Kabul. (See Part 1 of this analysis for the Afghanistan dimension of the "hole in the doughnut".) President Zardari is to be stripped of any authority beyond shaking hands at official functions. The top civilian is now Prime Minister Gillani --- how coincidental that he was profiled glowingly this week in the US media --- backed, perhaps surpassed, by the Pakistani military.

That will probably be enough to hold the line in Pakistan, barring the long-shot scenario of an implosion of the military structure. Obama, however, declared on Tuesday that Hold the Line is not enough. So can the US, with all the billions in aid and the rhetorical pushing, get the Pakistani military not only to put on offensives but to take the battle all the way into the insurgent heartland? Do US allies in Islamabad share the goal of Get Bin Laden?

(And even if the Pakistani military takes on the task, can you wage such a campaign without further dislocation --- not only physical but economic, social, and cultural --- of the Pakistani people? Can this be a cost-free campaign, given the tensions in Pakistani politics and society that are never far from the surface?)

I don't know the answers, even this late in the War on Terror game. Sometimes even a Hail Mary pass is successful.

But not often.

Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan

NOTE: The second part of Scott Lucas's "Gut Reaction" to the Obama speech, covering the policy in Pakistan, will now appear on Saturday.

Finally Barack Obama made up his mind about sending more troops to Afghanistan? If so, it's a vague resolution: the only specifics were that there would be 30,000+ more troops sent to fight the Taliban and troop withdrawal would start in 2011.

This is an announcement that comes up short in so many ways. Fighting the Taliban shoud not be the only worry for the US and the West. There are a wide range of issues that are jeopardizing security, stability, and democracy in Afghanistan, but none of those issues were discussed with even the vaguest of details.

A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)

Afghanistan may be a failure inherited by Obama from former President George W. Bush, but 10 months is enough to forget President Bush’s flaws for a moment and start scrutinizing President Obama’s policies. After those 10 months, the best that we get out of Obama is that he’s simply going to press ahead --- there has been no major shift in policy.

The most important of the issues ignored by Obama is the presence of warlords in the Afghan government, as their continued exercise of authority has made the Afghan populace disillusioned with the West’s approach to their troubles. There's the far-from-minor issue of Afghanistan turning into a narco-state. And Obama’s plan outlines little on how the US is going to deal with Pakistan’s continued sloth in stopping Taliban militants engaging in cross-border raids.

Corruption has become so widespread that hardly anything gets done in Afghanistan without being first tainted with a side-deal. The most prominent recent example is the serious allegations against the Minister of Mines and Industries, who reportedly received millions from China to grant them access to one of Afghanistan’s largest copper mines. There’s the challenge of making Afghanistan a state that is viable and not just heavily dependent on foreign aid. The trickle of money from the West, which will dry up sooner or later, and the sale of opium are propping up the country. Add to that astronomical unemployment, and you have a catastrophe in the making.

None of the above is addressed in a satisfactory manner in the Obama plan. In essence, this is simply a make-over of Bush’s policy in Iraq – a policy that might have succeeded there but might completely fail in Afghanistan. For, without addressing the above issues, even a million US troops will do little to help the situation.

Worse, Obama's not-so-grand package is wrapped in the announcement that troops would start to be flown back in 2011. This gives the resilient Taliban a simple timetable to follow. They’ve kept fighting for eight years, so no difficulty for them to sit back for two years and then start fighting full-force again .

On what basis is Obama going to bring the troops back? What makes him so sure that the war would be won or even stabilized by 2011? None of these questions were answered by the President, his plan, or his associates.

This is not the Iraq War. The people are different, their needs are different, and their problems are different. For all his rhetoric of change, Obama seems to really lack an understanding of what it really means here. And without that understanding, this war will continue to escalate and take more Afghan and American lives.

A Gut Reaction to Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)

The second part of "A Gut Reaction", covering the Obama policy in Pakistan, will appear on Saturday.

This was a terrible speech. More importantly, it may come to mark a terrible moment in the Obama Presidency. Most importantly, it may come to mark --- in months and years to follow --- a terrible moment in American foreign policy.

The speech is not terrible in its rhetoric or delivery. It is not terrible in its declaration of lofty values. It is not even terrible --- though I think it is evasive and misleading --- in its opening five paragraphs on a past tragedy to rationalise a blank check for current decisions. It is terrible because it is void of political strategy. This speech is either a stunning exercise in being oblivious to failure or hoping against hope that failure will never be exposed.

Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan

I'm plumping for the latter, not just because the President does not seem the oblivious type but because the hodge-podge of measures looks to be an attempt to buy some time for either political fortune or divine intervention to save the day.

So, as we thought yesterday, the number of 30,000 troops is put forward primarily as a domestic political compromise, rather than as the culmination of a military strategy for the campaign against the Afghan insurgency. The US commanders get most of their request, which gives Obama some insulation (but only some, as there are a lot of critics inside and outside the military who want even more of a troops-first approach) against domestic sniping.

So Obama put in, albeit almost as an afterthought to the troop announcement, put in a brief section on non-military measures. For there are those in the US, let alone abroad, who might think that more than a stick is required for stability. And this President is at pains to make clear that Afghanistan 2009 is not another Iraq 2003-2007. (We'll save Obama's Afghanistan 2009 is not Vietnam 1967 for the moment

But, for his domestic audience, Afghanistan 2009 can be Iraq 2007-2009. So, after patting himself on the back for the "responsible" policy in the latter which lays the foundation for a US withdrawal, Obama promised that his soon-to-be-apparent Afghan success would mean the first American troops could leave in July 2011.

It's a neat trick. You like the "surge" myth? Well, you've got a sequel. Not sure about the "surge" myth? Well, just go with me and we'll begin drawing this adventure to a close in 18 months.

Not that it's an easy trick, even for the sake of presentation. It's notable that, contrary to earlier leaks of 6000 additional forces from NATO countries to bolster his plan, Obama didn't cite a number last night. So far, he has only got a fig leaf of 500 more soldiers from Britain. With other allies like Canada now out of this battle, the President --- who emphasised Afghanistan-not-Vietnam because 42 countries were alongside the US --- is going to struggle to make this more than the US way, way out in front.

But let's leave such minor quibbles aside. The audacity of Obama's speech, and thus its terrible roar, was in the willful ignorance of matters closer to Kabul and indeed Islamabad.

Consider first of all the deception that underlay the speech. Five long paragraphs invoking 9-11 does not bring Osama bin Laden and his boys into Afghanistan. If Obama wants to follow the logic of his rhetoric, then the 30,000 US soldiers should be marching into Pakistan.

But that's not possible for political reasons (just as it hasn't been possible since bin Laden and Co. crossed the border in December 2001). So instead there has to be the convoluted horror story of the Taliban getting back into power in part of Afghanistan, inviting Al Qa'eda to a restored sanctuary, and posing no objections as more 9-11s are planned.

I'll leave the dissection of that nightmarish rationale to others who can explain clearly the defects of the thesis of the Taliban-Al Qa'eda "alliance".

Let's assume, however, that the fight in Helmand and Kandahar and Kunduz against Afghan insurgents is essential because of non-Afghan fighters across the border. For granting that assumption exposes the halfway house of Obama's solution: there is no political strategy to match his military escalation.

If the President picked up on anything between his initial escalation in March and last night, it should have been that he has no stable base
in Kabul. Eight months ago, he told the American public and the world that, in addition to the more than 30,000 forces being put into the country, the US would ensure that its Afghan partner focused on development, that it would not be mired in corruption, that it would make progress on security. Have a look between the lines of Obama's address yesterday --- General McChrystal saying that the security situation had worsened, the passing Presidential reference to "corruption" and the Afghan election --- and ask, "What did the March escalation achieve?"

The primary objective of the Karzai Government is to remain in power. If reducing corruption and fighting a battle to the death with the Taliban offered the maintenance of that power, then perhaps the Obama strategy would have a partner. If the US had some meaningful lever of pressure --- the threat of a political alternative? even a coup? --- against Karzai, then perhaps the Obama strategy would have a partner.

But we've been there and done that. Karzai and his circle have maintained power by cutting deals, whether you want to call that "corruption", and accepting that it cannot take on the insurgency throughout Afghanistan in a direct conflict. The Obama Administration considered taking Karzai out in its first three months and found that it had no good options to do so, either through the ballot box or beyond it.

Perhaps, and it is a big perhaps, the Obama Administration can get a convergence of interests with the Afghanistan Government through a political deal beyond Kabul. That's the meaning of Obama's briefly outstretched hand to "Taliban" members who will leave the movement. But the deal in question would have to be much more than that; in short, it would have to accept the Taliban and other insurgent groups as political actors in exchange for a renunciation of violence. And even if it is true that the CIA is broaching such a possibility, and that it is backed by the White House, this is a political negotiation that is far beyond Obama's extra 30,000 troops, far beyond his 9-11 rhetoric, and even beyond his conception of American power.