Intelligence failure

Here we go again. Seems my old Firm got taken for a ride by a guy posing as a senior Taleban figure, whose bona fides was apparently confirmed by senior individuals in the Karzai regime's security forces.

Cue the CIA to declare that they have "long been institutionally sceptical" of dealing with "non-marquee Taleban". Long-term being since last January, when they lost eight officers after a man they were cultivating came calling wearing a C-4 waistcoat and blew up their main station in Afghanistan.  

Cue politicians to schedule a judicial inquiry; cue journopukes, who as we know always check their sources so immaculately, to jeer and to demand greater oversight. The Times (£) second leader says:

It is surely time to abandon the Intelligence and Security Committee in its present form and replace it with a joint parliamentary intelligence committee of both houses with its own independent secretariat.

Hello? Earth to the Times: these are people the best and the brightest of whom fall for the most blatant journopuke stings and whose entire existence is one long round of off-the-record briefings to the press. Not to mention going unpunished when they reveal top secret operational details in and outside Parliament, or when exposed as agents of a hostile intelligence service.

As usual, the journopukes want it the way they like their sex: both ways. Intelligence services have to work with walk-ins, and cannot avoid being vulnerable to plausible fraudsters if they are to remain open to the possibility, however remote, that the genuine article might waltz in.

Half a million quid is PEANUTS compared to what a "marquee" Taleban figure could collect.

Also as usual, the MSM is missing the key point: the validation of this turkey by senior figures in the Karzai regime, who must have known he was a fraud. Two possibilities:

1. A desire to embarrass the Brits, who are not only the ancestral enemy but are also militarily as well as politically contemptible in Afghan eyes; or
2. The Karzai regime is stocked entirely with con-men who will flee the country the moment the US pulls out, to live very well on the money they have been salting away in numbered bank accounts, and they are ready to play along with any stupidity the Allies come up with to keep the scam going as long as possible.

 A bit of both, is my bet.

The Great Game

I'm linking to the Guardian, but the rest of the Brit mass media also reports below the fold the key deal now confirmed at the NATO summit meeting with Afghan President Karzai.

The Kremlin and western governments appear poised to embark on a range of joint security, political and military projects aimed at closing the worst period of friction since the cold war. Russian President Medvedev and NATO leaders are expected to agree on a range of policies and projects today, from Afghanistan to joint analysis of future security threats.

The Russians have agreed to expand NATO supply routes to and from Afghanistan, to service Afghan helicopters, train Afghan pilots and conduct joint programmes with the west aimed at countering the Afghan heroin trade.

OK - that will help take Pakistan out of the loop, and without that there is no hope whatever of getting out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Afghanistan has ALWAYS been a big geopolitical chili up Russia's arse, and now they are going to recover some of the influence they lost in 1979-88, with the blessings and indeed the gratitude of their old Cold War opponents.

Prince Harry mockumentary

I wish I had written David Bowden's acute article "The masturbatory world of the mockumentary". I'm wondering if there is not some way of setting up a perma-link to Spiked, as it is firing on all twelve cylinders right now and highlights the intellectual poverty of the MSM commentariat. Some highlights:

‘Mockumentary’ because, of course, none of these events have happened nor are particularly likely to, but by making it look like a documentary makes it a more effective masturbatory aid for Channel 4-loving liberals. . . . Far from being a sober interrogation of the issues that weighted up the merits of either side, we got a medieval morality play - with the comforting liberal message that people are essentially savages who need a strong and enlightened elite to protect them - played out in modern dress. . . .Yet the argument that it is ‘irresponsible’ to have made this film on the basis it might inspire real-life enactments and jeopardise the lives of British troops in the middle of fighting a war seem equally absurd. It is as if the Taliban sit around all day watching the backwards, anti-Enlightenment and medieval Channel 4.

The jawbone of an ass-hole

Anthony Loyd really should know better than to write as he did today in the Times (£). He has been an observer of enough wars to know that they are one cock-up after another, and that however meticulously an operation is planned, there are just too many variables to safely predict the exact outcome.

I do not know whether some Seal tossed a frag into the room where the unfortunate Linda Norgrove was being held by a gang of Haqqani talibs. Nor do I know whether, if he did, it was because the Haqs inside the room had shown an unequivocal determination to fight to the death and to take her with them.

Neither does Loyd, yet he rushes to judgement. First he states that of 74 foreign hostages taken by the Taliban since 2002, "only (?) 16 have been killed" and 58 released after negotiations, a better survival rate "it seems, than of surviving being rescued". It seems, does it? How many rescue attempts have there been? And what about the one who escaped, mentioned later in the article? Kinda messes up the figures, doesn't it?

Then there's this: "The Haqqanis - though profligate killers - can be as keen as any other Aghan militant group to keep hostages alive for leverage". Well, for starters you can take "militant" and shove it. But after that, what is the number of hostages taken by the Haqs, and how many have been killed? I do not know, and neither does Loyd - but it could have been the crucial opint that made the raid seem the lesser of two evils.   

Many years ago I was the negotiating adviser to a family whose father had been kidnapped and, based on considerable experience, I had come to the grim conclusion that we were dealing with the most deadly combination you can come up against: a gang of first-timers with an exaggerated idea of how much money they could extort, and in a hurry because they lacked the organization and infrastructure for a long negotiation.

A nervous gang can kill a hostage by mistake, and a gang that does not intend to kidnap again has no reason to keep the hostage alive. Accordingly, I advised the family to get the police anti-terrorist squad involved, not something I would have done - not least because it made my own situation extremely precarious - unless convinced that a rescue offered the best chance of getting our man back alive.

The kidnappers were indeed a bunch of amateurs, and the police soon zeroed in on their hide-out. When they burst in, one of the kidnappers was sitting opposite the door inside a small room with the hostage, who was manacled to a steel-framed bed. He pulled the pin on a grenade, saying he would die rather than surrender.

The door into the room had a glass panel over it, and one of the SWAT squad brought up a chair, took a quick peek, then smashed the glass with his assault rifle and shot the scumbag in the head. The dead man, of course, let go of the spoon, but he also bounced off the back of the chair and fell forward on the grenade.

The hostage hurled himself to one side, pulling the bed over him, but one piece of shrapnel got through to wound him in the shoulder. It turned out to be part of the lower mandible of the kidnapper. Later, in hospital, he joked that he had become a Philistine, because he had been wounded by the jawbone of an ass-hole.

If the hostage had died, there was no doubt whom everybody would have blamed. It was a calculated risk, to which thankfully I never again judged it necessary to expose a client. But the memory of that fraught moment makes me very reluctant to criticise anyone else when, forced to make a similar choice, it goes bad on them.

I flat out deny the right even to an opinion, let alone a "strategic" judgement, to a journopuke sitting thousands of miles away, in possession of a bare minimum of facts and with no operational knowledge whatever.

Pakistan-Afghanistan: guest post from Jay

It has often been said that Pakistan would make more sense as a federation of states than as a republic with its present centralized government. It has often seemed to be united mostly by its common religion, proximity to the Indus River, and its opposition to India.

Since its northern border has never been fully ratified or indeed recognized by an Afghan state, the condition of that state is of great importance to Pakistan. This situation has been complicated by the presence of four million displaced Afghans in Pakistan itself, who show no signs of returning home anytime soon. These refugees are Pukhtuns ('Pathans') like their tribal relatives (and enemies) along most of the southern tier of Afghanistan.

Whatever kind of political deal is made in Kabul following the departure of the US forces will of necessity require participation by representatives of the Taliban of Mullah Omar, the forces of the Haqqani Talibs, of the Pakistan government, and possibly will include the Jamaatis as well. If there is going to be an attempt to mine the mineral wealth of Afghanistan, everyone involved will want access to the future profits. 

But just in terms of Pakistan's national security, I am sure that Pakistani Army chief General Kayani is keenly attuned to developments in the Northwest and that his own ISI scouts are very busy trying to assess the present state of play in those parts.

The Punjab presents another, as yet unaddressed, area of militant Taliban activity. Although not fully aligned with either Mullah Omar or with the Haqqani, the southern Punjab holds many militant madrassas in Bahawalpur and Multan and is the home recruiting ground for the Kashmiri jihadis who perpetrated the 2008 Mumbai massacre. 

There are about three groups there, at least, who have been semi-acknowledged by the Mian brothers in Lahore: Shahbaz, the Chief Minister of the province, and Nawaz, the former Chief Minister and twice Prime Minister. This deal has however fallen through, as all such concessions to the Islamic militants do, and the jihadis have moved during the last year to either bomb or take over such notable Barelvi/Sufi shrines as that of Data Sahib outside Lahore, and have bombed a variety of targets within the city itself.

Civil authority seems to have weakened recently in Sindh as well. The continued targeted killings of muhajirs (Muslim immigrants from India) by Pukhtuns from the Awami Party have provoked a good deal of reciprocal violence from them. In Baluchistan, meanwhile, there is a great deal of militant feeling against Islamabad and the central government which is regarded, with some justification, as Punjabi dominated and exploitative of the other three provinces. There is a great deal of violence around Quetta and the writ of national law does not seem to run there any more than it does in the Northwest or in other Taliban-dominated areas.

General Kayani does not want to be the president or prime minister or even dictator of such a decaying polity. He is a hands-on general officer who understands how to lead men and to rely on his staff and his corps commanders. He knows what happened to Zia and how Musharraf failed. He has also been trained partly in America and knows something of how Americans think and respond. He is definitely the most important source of national power right now, but he does not want to waste that power by investing it in the political process directly. 

But he will need outside help, both militarily and financially, and the likeliest source is the USA, also needed to help keep India from becoming involved in Pakistan's problems more than is good for either of them. How all of this will play out in the long run, or even the short run, is beyond anyone's powers of prophecy.

George Friedman: unmitigated bollocks

"Pakistan and the US exit from Afghanistan", George Friedman's latest contribution to the free part of Stratfor on-line, is so breath-takingly bad that it requires no commentary. Well, maybe just the penultimate paragraph:

Pakistan has every reason to [provide the cover for turning a US retreat into a negotiated settlement]. It needs the United States over the long term to balance against India. It must have a stable or relatively stable Afghanistan to secure its western frontier. It needs an end to US forays into Pakistan that are destabilizing the regime. And playing this role would enhance Pakistan’s status in the Islamic world, something the United States could benefit from, too. We suspect that all sides are moving toward this end.

The Taliban hate their old masters in Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). The ISI hates the Americans. Any helping hand offered to the Americans will be interpreted by the "Islamic world" as further proof that Pakistan is a US proxy. India is going to be a world power eventually, which Pakistan will never be.

Apart from that, it's a great plan. 

Where are the British in Afghanistan?

Intriguing graphic in Der Spiegel. Seems there is no British presence in Afghanistan. The principal target of the article is the NGOs that have pullulated in the nutrient rich flow of inadequately audited international development aid.

Afghanistan has 303 international NGOs, also known as INGOs - including sub-sets dubbed BINGOs (business-related INGOs) and MANGOs (mafia-related NGOs). Over 2,000 Afghan NGOs have been disbanded for lack of evidence that they were doing anything, but there are still 1,327 operating.

After the end of World War II in the Pacific, religious rites known as "cargo cults" emerged among the more primitive islanders, pathetically trying to bring back the well-paid jobs and the extravagant logistics that came and went with the advancing US armed forces.

I wonder what the long-term effect of all this corrupting "charity" will be on the Afghans after the westerners and the hopelessly corrupt regime they sustain are gone?

The "Other"

Here's a nauseating, and seemingly well substantiated horror story from the Washington Post.

For weeks, 25-year-old Staff Sergeant Calvin R. Gibbs wound up a group of soldiers from 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment of the 5th Stryker [armoured infantry] Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and get away with it. On 15 January 2010 a solitary Afghan man, Gul Mudin, approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. One soldier tossed a grenade on the ground to create the impression of an attack. The others opened fire.

According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.

Forty-two years ago a new "shake and bake" subaltern leading a platoon of conscripts massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. The Army tried to cover it up, but when it was finally investigated the thing that emerged most clearly was that the soldiers did not regard the "gooks" as human beings.

A secondary factor was that, having lost comrades to booby traps set by an enemy who never gave them the catharsis of battle, the soldiers were possessed by an indiscriminate desire for vengeance. Not just against the "gooks" - they wanted pay-back for being where they were, fighting a war they knew they could not win.

Sound familiar? There is a limit to how much stress any human being can cope with. I would like to know the incidence of self-inflicted wounds and if any officer "fragging" is taking place, but this incident argues very strongly that even without considering the appalling cost of the continuing conflict to the Afghans, there is a prima facie case for the US Army to pull out for its own institutional health.

Bitter anniversary

Richard North comments on how fitting it is that British forces have just handed over Taliban-infested Sangin to the Afghan army (with US forces taking over responsibility for the still extremely volatile province) the day after the weekend chosen to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

The hand-over, he comments acidly, "follows in the great tradition of recent campaigning in Afghanistan, where British forces can add Sangin to the growing list of towns and settlements pacified, and where US forces can only stand back and admire the sheer skill, dedication and fortitude of the UK military and its leaders."

The template for this success, however, was undoubtedly forged in recent times by the experience in Iraq, where the British military brought us the stunning success of the al-Amarah campaign, followed by its storming success in Basra, which has earned the undying gratitude of the Iraqi people – those that survived the experience.

But for those who think such successes are recent, we need to look back 70 years to another great victory, where the RAF so successfully beat off the German air force that the citizens of London and elsewhere only had to endure another eight months of bombing and a few tens of thousands dead and injured as the Luftwaffe roamed almost without challenge in the barely-defended night-time skies.

Steady on, Richard. The daylight Battle of Britain was a victory. It was the pre-war British government's refusal to institute any kind of civil defence provisions, despite believing that "the bomber will always get through", that acted as a tragic multiplier for the Luftwaffe's relatively light night bombing.

Cutting off her nose to spite her face

In a Guardian post Priyamvada Gopal, who must be assumed (from her inability to develop a coherent argument) to have been a two-for-one affirmative action hire at the Cambridge English faculty, somehow manages to turn Time magazine's cover of the mutilated Afghan woman into an attack on the decadent west:

In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

Yeah, well - maybe Gopal is too young to recall that the Soviets tried, really very hard, to install "a radical people's modernity" in Afghanistan. Didn't go too well for them - and Afghans of Gopal's persuasion were hunted down like rats after the Sovs pulled out.

The Afghan Wikileaks

Intriguing article titled "How the Wikileaks are changing Afghan hearts and minds" in The New Republic. The premise is that:

For many Afghans, the release of thousands of secret military documents - which detail civilian casualties, corrupt officials, and meddlesome neighbors - amounts to a vindication of their view of the war. Many in the West argue the documents contain little new, and that may be true in general. But the devil resides in the details, and the details here paint a vivid and devastating picture of how Afghans view the American war.

Dare one ask how "many Afghans" can read the documents in English - or will be able to even if they are translated into Pashto and Dari? The hearts and minds that may be changed by the Wikileaks document trove are more likely to be those of monolingual English speakers - as the article makes clear, the documents reveal nothing that the insurgent Pashtuns have not known for a long time.

Christina Lamb - a real journalist

Christina Lamb is an outstanding exception to the norm in a trade dominated by lazy, cowardly drones. Her account (here) of an ambush she was caught up with in Afghanistan when embedded with 3 Para in 2006 will feature in any future anthology of war reporting.  

Worth remembering that the no less admirable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was one of the few reporters (and the only Brit) who bothered to go into Nicaragua to interview the Contras, and became persona non grata in Washington by exposing the crimes committed by the Clinton regime (interview here).

No journalist has lived the modern Great Game more fully than Christina; twice expelled from Pakistan by the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), she was in the motorcade when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and she really knows what she writes about. Her article on Pakistan in the News Review section of today's pay-walled Sunday Times is very well worth paying for.

Although whatever sub-editor chose to title it "Whacking Pakistan", with a picture of Cameron hitting a cricket ball, deserves to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit.

The spur for the article is the publishing by Wikileaks of a compendium of over 91,000 classified US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The media have focused on the reports that highlight the ambiguous - not to say duplicitous - role of the ISI in the conflict, including contact between senior ISI officers and their Frankenstein's monster, the Taliban. 

In addition to a courage generally absent from the mutually masturbating Anglo-American press corps, Christina is also able to handle complexity with dispassionate intelligence. As she says, "After 23 years of reporting on Pakistan and the ISI, I know that nothing is quite what it seems. Is it really more dangerous to take on Pakistan than to keep pretending it is on side?" She concludes:

All I can say is that the last time the West wanted the ISI's help, against the Russians in the 1980s, and turned a blind eye to its other activities, Islamabad became a nuclear power. Others will argue it was when we cut them off in the 1990s that they sold the nuclear designs and centrifuges to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Indeed - the ISI is the CIA's Frankenstein's monster, which now hates its maker almost as passionately as the Taliban hates the ISI. British casualties are just collateral damage in a vicious triangular fight that really does not concern them, and from which their as yet unwounded comrades should be extracted as soon as possible.

Time magazine's stark cover story

This is 18 year-old Aisha, mutilated by the the Taliban for fleeing an abusive marriage. "What happens if we leave Afghanistan" does rather beg the question: If this is still going on after nine years of occupation and uncounted billions of development aid, why remain?

Managing Editor Richard Stengel, in a departure from the Time norm, wrote an editorial to explain the story behind the ghastly image, balancing considerations of Aisha's safety and how children seeing the cover will react against the need to tell it like it is in images as well as words.

In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening - and what can happen - in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan. 

There does not seem to be any doubt that the US-led coalition of the increasingly unwilling is now at war with the Pashtun people (see the eloquent maps here). These are the dreaded "Pathans" of Raj frontier warfare, who fit the absolute social nadir described by Hobbes perfectly:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

So the answer to Time magazine's ambiguous cover question-statement is that we are going to leave, the puppets we have propped up and the native security forces we have trained are going to be killed if they do not change sides or flee opportunely, and Afghan women will continue to be brutalized by viciously misogynist male homosexuals who want nothing to do with modernity and whose sole attribute is outstanding personal courage.

Afghan war in maps

From the Guardian:

Locations of IED attacks correspond exactly to the following map from The Heritage Foundation:

Three hundred

The three hundredth British fatal casualty from the Afghan campaign has died in a Birmingham hospital. There is a bitter post by Richard North on EU Referendum, from which the following collages. I will not demean the men who died by portraying them as victims, but I find the silhouettes, in particular, unutterably poignant:

Afghanistan: safe prediction

Now that both the USA and the British have signalled their intention to start pulling out of Afghanistan next year, casualties will soar.

Why am I so confident? Because the leaders of the insurgent groups will compete among each other to attack the occupying forces, hoping to establish a stronger bargaining position for the power carve-up that will follow the departure of the infidels.

Just as they did in Aden after the arsehole Wilson announced a date for the British withdrawal. And just as they did once the Soviets began to pull out of . . . Afghanistan. Which makes The One and Cameron prolapsed arseholes.