Lock on Target - The Media

[54/102 CEF]

Here's a story by Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail today

High level stuff and I colour code it for

Red = a BS Item or we can do way better
Green = I tend to agree
Yellow = I tend to disagree

Then a sum up

Are Canadians getting the truth about Afghanistan?
JEFFREY SIMPSON
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
July 15, 2008

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was correct last week when he said about Afghanistan: "We have serious challenges there, and we simply must make progress on governance and security ... in the next 12 to 24 months. We have got to get the situation moving in the right direction."
The implication was clear, and accurate: The "situation" is not moving in the "right direction."
Robert Gates, the U.S. Defence Secretary, agreed. "We have clearly seen an increase in violence in Afghanistan," he said.

With Mr. Harper and Mr. Gates essentially saying the same thing, why is Canada's new Chief of the Defence Staff, General Walter Natynczyk, insisting that increases in violence in Afghanistan have been "insignificant."
It is one thing to do a Hillier-esque rah-rah to rally the troops and feed the goat of the "we love the military" media in Canada, it's another to deform reality.

In March, the Manley report demanded "practical, verifiable criteria" for assessing security in Afghanistan. Nothing has apparently changed.

Canadians are still getting spin, but the spin is getting further removed from the reality being reported by every other source of information, including some Canadian media, U.S. military and diplomatic sources, European observers, the Senlis Council, writers such as Ahmed Rashid, informed academics who spend time in Afghanistan, and think tanks monitoring the Afghanistan situation. The weekend Gen. Natynczyk offered his assessment from Afghanistan, nine Americans died in a highly co-ordinated Taliban attack on a base near the Pakistan border. That same weekend, newspaper reports suggested the United States was going to draw down forces from Iraq more rapidly than had been anticipated, so that it could deploy more to Afghanistan. The United States had previously committed an additional 3,500 troops. Reports now suggest the figure might be 10,000.
A series of factors are worsening the Afghanistan situation, no matter what the outgoing and incoming Canadian defence chiefs argue.

Within Pakistan, the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies are well established, especially in the border areas. The new Pakistani government seems to lack the power or the will to do anything about them.[/color]

Islamic madrassas and other recruiting havens are providing a steady stream of terror recruits for action in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Money from the drug trade and jihadi supporters in such places as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States provide money to pay families who lose an offspring in the war against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Almost everyone with even some knowledge of Pakistan believes elements within the country's security forces support the jihadis. [

Last week's bomb explosion at the Indian embassy in Kabul illustrated again the old struggle between India and Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan.
The opium trade is flourishing. NATO seems helpless to stop it, thereby giving insurgents access to ready cash.
Drying up financial resources, sealing borders and isolating insurgents from the local population are three fundamental rules of counterinsurgency warfare. NATO hasn't got a grip on any of them. Unless it does get a grip, there is no chance of winning - however winning is defined - in Afghanistan.
Similarly, NATO has far too few soldiers for such a bleak and bewildering country. Kandahar, alone, is the size of New Brunswick. Canada is deploying there about 2,300 people, of whom 800 to 1,000 can actually fight.

It was a telling comment on the state of the military that when it became apparent these numbers were too few, the cry went up not for more of our own forces but for troops from another country. That country turned out to be the United States.

Afghanistan is a country within which many elements can be fairly described as post-medieval. The code of conduct of the Pashtun, the tribal group of the South, is so foreign to Western thinking that every occupier who has encountered the code struggled to understand it.
So, too, with what passes for the governance of a country whose tribal rivalries, customs and mores go back to the mists of time. What we consider corruption is normal practice for tribal chieftains, who distribute some of the largesse to their followers and use the rest to secure their position and the security of their group against "others."
Mr. Harper was right to say the situation needs to be turned around, but he did not suggest how. It would be instructive to know what he might have in mind

My take

Completely misses the Combined Arms effect of the Alliance. Misses the non military aspects but suggests the long term culture is impervious to the West. The Govt is risk playing in the sense that there may be no solution to quiet sstabilty and we will - it has been suggested be there for a generation – the voter isn’t focussing on Afghan – he does see domestic things – Oil run –up will naturally get more attention than Afghan. Then what?

Well?

 

[dukkadukka]

green on green isn't fun.  Basically I didn't read anything you agreed with.

 

[Teddy Ruxpin]

I was quite annoyed by this piece.  Simpson basically accuses (if his headline writer is reflective of his intent) the CF of deliberately misleading Canadians as to the true extent of the insurgency.

Simpson's lack of knowledge is stunning, even though he bases much of his rant upon "facts".  For example, he cites NATO's failure to control the drug trade as a symptom of failure, without acknowledging that NATO is not mandated to conduct counter-drug operations.  He quotes numbers of soldiers that are misleading at best, suggests US deployments to Kandahar are symptomatic of Canadian weakness and leans on "academics" to support his contention that - essentially - the CF is lying.

Does Simpson realize that the military in theatre tracks each and every security incident on a daily basis to a level far more detailed than could ever be possible by a civilian organization?  Did he bother to conduct his own analysis?  I thought not....  No, instead, we're there's a deliberate attempt to cover-up and obfuscate.

The desire from some parts of the media for a Canadian Vietnam, "quagmire" and "Bright Shining Lie" included, is becoming overwhelming.  Simpson's is just one of several media reports today that take this perspective and attempt to "prove" a conspiracy.  I have no issue with valid commentary and with a different perspective, but it's getting a bit much.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an editorial that:

1. Supports Simpson’s ill-informed position;

2. Reinforces Simpson by appearing in the same edition – on the facing page; and

3. Represents the official position of “Canada’s National Newspaper.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080714.wENATYNCZYK15/BNStory/specialComment/home

Wishful thinking does not help in Afghanistan

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

July 14, 2008 at 9:19 PM EDT

General Walter Natynczyk, the Chief of the Defence Staff, has asked journalists to believe that violence in Kandahar has barely increased in the past few years, contradicting recent statistics showing that insurgent attacks may have as much as doubled from last year. Since he became the Chief of the Defence Staff, this is his first specific comment on the Taliban insurgency. It is not a good start.

While Gen. Natynczyk's statement may be true as applied to the first few days of July, it is evidently false when one takes a longer view. According to data collected by a respected security consultant in Afghanistan, there have been as many as 532 attacks as of July 6, 77 per cent more than the 300 incidents in the same period last year.

As the chief officer of Canada's military, Gen. Natynczyk does his soldiers and other Canadians a disservice when he understates the challenges the Canadian forces face in Kandahar. When pressed to acknowledge that the security situation has worsened, he instead claimed that Canada's control of the countryside has strengthened, that the insurgents are growing weaker and that residents of Kandahar have returned to “their normal pattern of life.” These claims are tenuous at best. Unfortunately, Gen. Natynczyk gives the impression that he prefers a rosy outlook to the uncomfortable truth and that he believes Canadians prefer it, too.

Gen. Natynczyk's predecessor, former chief of the defence staff General Rick Hillier, was respected for rarely obscuring the truth, even when Canadians did not want to hear it. His candour was most evident in his contradiction of the Speech from the Throne in November, when he said it would take more than twice as long as the government estimated for Afghanistan to be able to meet its own security needs. While Gen. Hillier occasionally overreached into the political realm, as in his call in February for MPs to pass a motion expressing support for Canadian troops, his blunt honesty won him trust.

Gen. Natynczyk was not obliged to speak about the increasing violence in Kandahar. Nor must he go as far out of his way as Rick Hillier to position himself as a straight-shooter. But when he chooses to offer assessments, they should be frank. He not only risks his reputation by appearing to distort the facts, but he could also contribute to an underestimation of the real risk to Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, on the part of both the government and the public.

First: I like the idea of media that have and express strong opinions. I expect the media to be honest and tell us that they support (and oppose) this, that or the other political party or, if they wish to be officially ‘neutral,’ that they support or oppose these, those or the other policies. Thus I find no fault with the editorial positions of the Good Grey Globe or the National Post or the Toronto Star – I do find fault with the abysmal level of military ignorance demonstrated by the Globe’s star columnist and its editorial board members.

The editorial writers are trying to pick the fly-shit out of the pepper when they compare 532 to 300 – these (for a six month period? for a whole year?) are the difference between 2.9 versus 1.6 or 1.5 versus 0.8 attacks per day. How is this significant in a WAR for heaven’s sake? Many of those additional attacks are, arguably, signs of success in Kandahar because they took place elsewhere – in the soft areas protected by the European military tourists. The Globe and Mail editorialists are guilty of that with which they try to smear Gen. Natynczyk: the selective and misleading use of statistics.

Second: I think Gen. Natynczyk had better get used to this. The media had a love/hate relationship with Gen. Hillier: they loved him because he was a newsmaker and he was a master of great ‘sound-bites.’ They hated him because he represents everything they, most (but not all) people in the media, despise: the USA. Natynczyk, like Hillier, served, unapologetically, at a senior level with the US Army – that’s unforgivable.

Finally: it is fine, fair and proper that the Globe and Mail disagrees with the Government of Canada’s foreign policy – going back over six years and three governments from two parties, now – and with some of the military decisions successive governments have made. Many good, loyal, thoughtful Canadians disagree with those policies and actions. It is unfair and improper to attack Gen. Natynczyk, personally for his considered, professional opinion.

Gen. Natynczyk will not counterattack; he’s a professional soldier and a gentleman.

I will.

The Globe and Mail makes ill-informed, unsubstantiated allegations that verge on slander. The assertions are ill-informed because the Globe and Mail does not have a single staff member (including e.g. Christie Blatchford and Graeme Smith) who are even remotely qualified to assess the success or failure of counter-insurgency operations. They are unsubstantiated because the editorial uses one piece of quite useless data and then builds upon that to smear a distinguished Canadian soldier. It is yellow journalism. The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself – but it’s probably not.


Attention Ontario villages! We have found your missing idiots. They’re in the Globe’s editorial room.

 

[54/102 CEF]

I bet you can't slander an appointee of the government - thus ahhhhhhh fresh meat

 

[CountDC]

I like the way the take a comment about Kandahar and disprove it by using info on all of Afghan. Also comparing the Canadian experience with the US experience is out of wack.  Just because the US is experiencing more attacks doesn't mean we are - just means they are targetted more.

 

[54/102 CEF]

What Jeffrey Simpson wishes he wrote

from www.stratfor.com

Now for the Hard Part: From Iraq to Afghanistan
July 15, 2008

Related Special Topic Page
U.S. Military Involvement in Iraq
By George Friedman

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues.

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

Obviously, there is a significant political dimension to the announcement. It occurred shortly after Sen. Barack Obama began to shift his position on Iraq from what appeared to be a demand for a rapid withdrawal to a more cautious, nuanced position. As we have pointed out on several occasions, while Obama’s public posture was for withdrawal with all due haste, his actual position as represented in his position papers was always more complex and ambiguous. He was for a withdrawal by the summer of 2010 unless circumstances dictated otherwise. Rhetorically, Obama aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but his position on the record was actually much closer to Sen. John McCain’s than he would admit prior to his nomination. Therefore, his recent statements were not inconsistent with items written on his behalf before the nomination — they merely appeared s o.

The Bush administration was undoubtedly delighted to take advantage of Obama’s apparent shift by flanking him. Consideration of the troop withdrawal has been under way for some time, but the timing of the leak to The New York Times detailing it must have been driven by Obama’s shift. As Obama became more cautious, the administration became more optimistic and less intransigent. The intent was clearly to cause disruption in Obama’s base. If so, it failed precisely because the public took the administration’s announcement so casually. To the extent that the announcement was political, it failed because even the Democratic left is now less concerned about the war in Iraq. Politically speaking, the move was a maneuver into a vacuum.

But the announcement was still significant in other, more important ways. Politics aside, the administration is planning withdrawals because the time has come. First, the politico-military situation on the ground in Iraq has stabilized dramatically. The reason for this is the troop surge — although not in the way it is normally thought of. It was not the military consequences of an additional 30,000 troops that made the difference, although the addition and changes in tactics undoubtedly made an impact.

What was important about the surge is that it happened at all. In the fall of 2006, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, it appeared a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was inevitable. If Bush wouldn’t order it, Congress would force it. All of the factions in Iraq, as well as in neighboring states, calculated that the U.S. presence in Iraq would shortly start to decline and in due course disappear. Bush’s order to increase U.S. forces stunned all the regional players and forced a fundamental recalculation. The assumption had been that Bush’s hands were tied and that the United States was no longer a factor. What Bush did — and this was more important than numbers or tactics — was demonstrate that his hands were not tied and that the United States could not be discounted.

The realization that the Americans were not going anywhere caused the Sunnis, for example, to reconsider their position. Trapped between foreign jihadists and the Shia, the Americans suddenly appeared to be a stable and long-term ally. The Sunni leadership turned on the jihadists and aligned with the United States, breaking the jihadists’ backs. Suddenly facing a U.S.-Sunni-Kurdish alliance, the Shia lashed out, hoping to break the alliance. But they also split between their own factions, with some afraid of being trapped as Iranian satellites and others viewing the Iranians as the solution to their problem. The result was a civil war not between the Sunnis and Shia, but among the Shia themselves.

Tehran performed the most important recalculation. The Iranians’ expectation had been that the United States would withdraw from Iraq unilaterally, and that when it did, Iran would fill the vacuum it left. This would lead to the creation of an Iranian-dominated Iraqi Shiite government that would suppress the Sunnis and Kurds, allowing Iran to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. It was a heady vision, and not an unreasonable one — if the United States had begun to withdraw in the winter of 2006-2007.

When the surge made it clear that the Americans weren’t leaving, the Iranians also recalculated. They understood that they were no longer going to be able to create a puppet government in Iraq, and the danger now was that the United States would somehow create a viable puppet government of its own. The Iranians understood that continued resistance, if it failed, might lead to this outcome. They lowered their sights from dominating Iraq to creating a neutral buffer state in which they had influence. As a result, Tehran acted to restrain the Shiite militias, focusing instead on maximizing its influence with the Shia participating in the Iraqi government, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A space was created between the Americans and Iranians, and al-Maliki filled it. He is not simply a pawn of Iran — and he uses the Americans to prevent himself from being reduced to that — but neither is he a pawn of the Americans. Recent negotiations between the United States and the al-Maliki government on the status of U.S. forces have demonstrated this. In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal — and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

The United States obviously does not want to leave a massive force in Iraq. First, its more ambitious mission has evaporated; that moment is gone. Second, the U.S. Army and Marines are exhausted from five years of multidivisional warfare with a force not substantially increased from peacetime status. The Bush administration’s decision not to dramatically increase the Army was rooted in a fundamental error: namely, the administration did not think the insurgency would be so sustained and effective. They kept believing the United States would turn a corner. The result is that Washington simply can’t maintain the current force in Iraq under any circumstances, and to do so would be strategically dangerous. The United States has no strategic ground reserve at present, opening itself to dangers outside of Iraq. Therefore, if the United States is not going to get to play colossus of the Middle East, it needs to reduce its forces dramatically to recreate a strategic reserv e. Its interests, the interests of the al-Maliki government — and interestingly, Iran’s interests — are not wildly out of sync. Washington wants to rapidly trim down to a residual force of a few brigades, and the other two players want that as well.

The United States has another pressing reason to do this: It has another major war under way in Afghanistan, and it is not winning there. It remains unclear if the United States can win that war, with the Taliban operating widely in Afghanistan and controlling a great deal of the countryside. The Taliban are increasingly aggressive against a NATO force substantially smaller than the conceivable minimum needed to pacify Afghanistan. We know the Soviets couldn’t do it with nearly 120,000 troops. And we know the United States and NATO don’t have as many troops to deploy in Afghanistan as the Soviets did. It is also clear that, at the moment, there is no exit strategy. Forces in Iraq must be transferred to Afghanistan to stabilize the U.S. position while the new head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus — the architect of the political and military strategy in Iraq — f igures out what, if anything, is going to change.

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Petraeus’ success in Iraq had a great deal to do with Tehran’s calculations of its self-interest. In Pakistan, by contrast, it is unclear at the moment whether anyone is in a position to even define the national self-interest, let alone pursue it. And this means that every additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan raises the stakes in Pakistan. It will be interesting to see how Afghanistan and Pakistan play out in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a theater of operations that lends itself to political soundbites.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>According to data collected by a respected security consultant in Afghanistan, there have been as many as 532 attacks as of July 6, 77 per cent more than the 300 incidents in the same period last year.

What does that mean?  Were there 300 section+ attacks conducted in one year, and 532 shots fired by individuals in the next?  What exactly?  It would be nice if people would cite something meaningful instead of indeterminate pin-counting.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Brad, surely you don't expect a member of the media to dirty their hands by doing some digging?

 

[Greymatters]

What does that mean?  Were there 300 section+ attacks conducted in one year, and 532 shots fired by individuals in the next?  What exactly?  It would be nice if people would cite something meaningful instead of indeterminate pin-counting.

Alternatively, it could just mean they have a better collection system from more outposts/units, so the increase in numbers can be misleading...

 

[MarkOttawa]

A post at The Torch:

Afstan: The Globe and Mail manufactures a story undercutting our mission
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2008/07/afstan-globe-and-mail-manufactures.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Long in the tooth]

This is a fine article on the detailed art of Realpolitics.  Years ago there was a program called 'Balance of Power' in which could influence over 130 countries in various ways, from diplomatic to military to economic, both favourably and unfavourably.  Problem was, these countries also had their own ideas.  If you gave one country military or economic aid it was not uncommon for that to spill over them giving aid or assistance to other countries... that were not aligned with you.

I think the US has done a much better job than most people, including its own citizens (I'm in Iowa at the moment) give it credit for.