How Bin Laden Escaped in 2001: The Lessons of Tora Bora
How Bin Laden Escaped in 2001: The Lessons of Tora Bora by Yaniv Barzilai, The Daily Beast.
Exactly twelve years ago, during the cold Winter days between December 10-16, in the jagged mountains of Tora Bora that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, Osama bin Laden walked unencumbered into Pakistan and disappeared for nine and a half years.
Just before, however, bin Laden had made an egregious error. After spending a couple seconds too long on his radio, the CIA pinpointed bin Laden’s location to within ten meters. One hour later, forty of America’s most elite special operations forces raced to kill the most infamous man alive.
It was the only day for nearly a decade in which the United States knew exactly where Osama bin Laden was. And, it was the last time that the majority of al Qaeda’s leadership would ever be in the same place…
This article illustrates something that I have long thought; for all the massive violence we can and do employ, way deep down inside we have forgotten how to win. Whether this is because of a sort of diffidence or a bizarre form of politeness or a cultural immaturity that equates tactical success with actual victory I don’t know, but we don’t know how to finish a fight. We won’t or can’t win. It reminds me of the Japanese Navy in WWII. They were satisfied going home after a battle with having got more warships than they lost but having left the transports intact.
It’s like we don’t know what winning actually is. We have been doing this for decades. According to this article we could have had OBL in 2001 but we let him go. Maybe we would have missed him but we’ll never know because we didn’t try. We in effect just sat there. I think we didn’t try to win because we don’t know how to win or what winning really is anymore.
I was wondering what some of the smarter people than me on here would say and think of this article. If most of what the author alleges is true then I don’t know whether I should be sad, angry or both. I know there’s always two sides to the story and I also know sometimes looking back in hindsight things sometimes are much clearer than they were at the moment in time when decisions were made but really? The funny thing is I remember a few smart people way back in 2002/2003 saying that they were 99% sure UBL/OBL was in Pakistan and that our government knew of his whereabouts but were afraid to do anything about it for fear of upsetting the Pakistanis.
It is hardly worth debating counterfactuals, but truly, how different would our current position be today if we had successfully blocked this group of AQ and Taliban at Tora Bora? Perhaps we would have not invaded Iraq. That is a huge consideration. But we had already bought into the quagmire of taking the Taliban government of Afghanistan out of power and replacing it with a government composed of the Northern Alliance and other opportunists who rushed in to take advantage of this latest flip of Afghan patronage power enabled by a foreign invader.
The reality is that while Afghanistan was certainly convenient to the Taliban as a base of operations for their nascent regional UW campaign plan, it was certainly never essential for the execution of that larger vision, then, now, or in the future. That has been a false narrative of our own making that has kept us fighting over control of specific patches of dirt when one of the most widely accepted aspects of insurgency is that controlling specific terrain is largely irrelevant and unnecessary for the conduct of successful insurgency.
The value of capturing/killing bin Laden is high, but not because of the impact of his loss of leadership on AQ, but rather for the emotional closure it helped provide to an American populace who in practical terms really only wanted two things post 9/11: 1. Revenge on those who attacked us (and neither the Taliban nor Saddam were part of that attack); and 2., to feel as safe in the daily conduct of our lives as we had felt on 9/10.
To feel avenged, to feel safe. These are subjective perceptions that should have shaped our operations from the beginning. But because we never identified logical ends for the type of conflict we found ourselves in at the beginning, we instead sought more objective measures of victory more suitable for conventional campaigns that have morphed and expanded year by year as the pursuit of these ends, like the end of a rainbow, is never reached. We didn’t know what we were doing, and when one doesn’t know what to do, but action is demanded, one does what one knows. So we toppled and rebuilt governments, we wrestled with the resultant revolutionary insurgencies against the governments we created and the resultant resistance insurgencies against our presence and actions in general. And to this we kept up a heavy dose of CT in the belief that killing individual leaders would somehow kill the movement they led…
Mao once said. “I saw a parade and leapt in front.” Bin Laden too saw a parade. He did not create the parade with his ideology, his ideology was merely the marching band music to get the parade to follow him. But those “parades”, in disenfranchised and oppressed populations across the greater Middle East were all well-formed and growing long before 9/11.
It is unfortunate we missed this opportunity at Tora Bora. But it is tragic that we still miss the opportunity before us to reframe our understanding of why AQ and other such groups continue to expand their influence in spite of our mighty efforts. This has always been much more about politics than ideology. On 9/11 the US “occupied by policy” much of the greater Middle East, and there was and is widespread perception that that “occupation” is inappropriate and that it enables leaders to avoid listening to the reasonable grievances of their own people when they are secure in the protection of the US Government and our desire to sustain the status quo for as long as possible.
It is an interesting tactical problem to figure out how we could have executed a more effective blocking action at Tora Bora. But it is strategically fascinating to ponder how we can convert an overly controlling foreign policy into one based more on influence; on how we can move beyond justifying actions regardless of how outrageous simply because they are “legal” and instead learn to prioritize designing and executing operations that are perceived as appropriate by the populations those operations affect.
The world had changed by 9/11 and it continues to change. The relative balance of power between people and governments continues to shift in the favor of the people. We need to think long and hard about what that means about the design and implementation of our foreign policies and how we pursue our vital interests. The strategic lessons not learned of the past 12 years are enormous. Yet they largely go undiscussed.
The author wrote:
“Exactly twelve years ago, during the cold Winter days between December 10-16, in the jagged mountains of Tora Bora that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, Osama bin Laden walked unencumbered into Pakistan and disappeared for nine and a half years.”
The suggestion that OBL walked thru the The White Mountains into Pakistan in December I find troublesome. My team passed thru a pass similar to one at the rear of Tora Bora in October and we came very near to dying from the cold and altitude. Half my team were convinced we were dead men. The snow was too deep for pack animals and even waiting for the snow to refreeze in the early hours you still sank to your crotch. And that was in October. Even with no gear, at night, below freezing, 3500 meters ASL and not in the best of health OBL IMHO wouldn’t have stood a chance.
OBL would have been given good advice that he wouldn’t make it thru and chosen an alternative. If I understand things correctly he took that advice and went down to the Jalalabad Road (straight thru our units rushing to ‘cut him off at the pass’) crossed over and followed the Kabul River upstream north into Kunar and crossed over into Pakistan in the spring/summer.
If in Dec 2001 we had insisted OBL had passed over the White Mountains the Pak Army would have correctly assumed we had a different agenda for getting a force into Parachinar (the nearest town on the Pak side of the White Mountains ) and refused. That would have flagged big time in the Beltway and a huge shit storm would have began.
There are two Pak Amored Div and two Mechanized Infantry Div in this region of Pakistan plus the Fronteir Corps and several million armed Pushtoons tribemen. Perhaps in the near term the USAF might have said they could hold them back as they dropped the Airborne onto Parachinar and the Airborne would retreat back along the Pul-i-Alam road to AF or perhaps a Joint Force doing a pincher movement thru Pul-i-Alam in the south and Landi Kotal in the north (the mind boggles) and trap OBL . Either way it would have taken a decision by Congress.
So perhaps if we had indeed ‘pursued’ OBL thru the mountains in Dec 2001, come 2013 we might now have a copy of a ‘White Mountain Resolution’ to pin on the wall next to our copy of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. IMHO if there had been such a Resolution from Congress (remember this is only 3 months after 9/11) and we had gotten away with ten times the dead we lost after getting our facts wrong in the Gulf of Tonkin we would have been very lucky indeed.
Meanwhile OBL would have been sitting up in Kunar laughing and marveling at how perfect his plan worked to get a bunch of Saudi political dissidents to crash a few planes into Manhattan and the Beltway and draw the US into a nuclear war with Pakistan.
JMO
RC
I’ve enjoyed reading your comments about this issue. Unfortunately, we got somewhat off track with some speculation while completely ignoring some of the elephants in the room. For starters regarding whether bin Laden crossed at Tora Bora, perhaps these articles cast some light:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-battle-tora-bora
And then there is this earlier one from 2005:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11TORABORA.html?scp=2&sq=Osama%20bin%20Laden%20%22New%20York%20TImes%20Magazine%22%20&st=cse&_r=0
Both seem to indicate months of bin Laden bulldozer preparation of roads leading to massive cave compounds constructed in the Soviet-control years by our own assistance to jihadis. Osama bin Laden and family also practiced road marches over the mountains for up to 14 hours at a time. One article mentioned using horses to get through the snow. And while I’m astounded to read many of Rant Corps first-hand comments at times, I’m equally puzzled that they did not consider the use of snowshoes to avoid sinking into the snow.
However, one of the elephants is that the Soviets bombed Tora Bora for years unsuccessfully while the USAF used B-52 to drop upwards of 700,000 lbs of bombs on the cave complex. That is the equivalent of 700 1,000 lb bombs in a very small area. Now picture an equal number of PLA short and medium range missiles attempting the same damage against a single target cave complex on Taiwan. However, they don’t have just a single target to attack but rather multiple targets. They also could not fly bombers over Taiwan like we did over an Afghanistan without air and missile defenses or fighter aircraft.
So when you look at the number of allies who will have their own missiles, plus their own air forces and navies, and their own bases that have U.S. forces to assist, you start to realize how minor the first strike threat is of the PLA 2nd Artillery Corps missile threat of 1500 missiles, many of which are nukes and would not be used. Of course that also assumes that China wants to simultaneously P.O. all its adjacent neighbors and end up with long term good relations as an end state. Equally puzzling is the belief by many that the PLA could target an aircraft carrier with a multitude of casualties and the U.S. would just capitulate given our opposite reaction to 3000 dead on 9/11.
While an offshore control blockade most certainly would be viable against China after their first strike, I can’t imagine any need to blockade Pakistan given a cooperative Musharraf of the time who allowed us access over their land to Afghanistan. I can’t imagine a nuclear war between the U.S. and Pakistan given the standoff MAD deterrence that exists between India and Pakistan with far fewer nuclear weapons involved and far less long range reach. Whether we could/should have gotten bin Laden back then is largely irrelevant. We did get him in the end, and did help Afghanistan long enough to build a substantial ANSF. That force, if we continue to fund and support it from the air against any “Easter Offensive” will be adequate to ensure no return to an open sanctuary in Afghanistan far from our sea-based airpower…and long-range cruise missiles that already failed to work once before 9/11.
No matter how many counterfactuals we analyze, it is probably indisputable that without a large scale 12-year presence in Afghanistan, we would not have overland and overflight rights through Pakistan today had we left immediately after “mission accomplished”. We would not have gotten bin Laden. Al Qaeda and the Taliban would have returned post haste with nothing to stop them but isolated militias. The risk of al Qaeda getting a Pakistani nuke would have been greater as Rant Corp points out. True al Qaeda and company moved elsewhere…where Navy and land-based airpower can more easily access and target them and their leaders.
In a court of law this entire thread is what might be called “relevant, but immaterial” (in that the information, while interesting and applicable to the case at hand, in no way helps resolve said case).
At a tactical level AQ is a pain in the ass. Tactically they are “a threat.” They came to our country, they murdered our citizens, and while they did so in a war-like way, it was plain old, garden variety mass murder and we need to bring justice to those who perpetrated the act, and peace to those who suffered a tragic loss from that same act. Acting like a proverbial elephant with an irrational fear of mice, tromping all over any place where we think mice might hide with little regard to the impression that is creating in the minds of those innocently affected by our tromping is not making us safer. Quite the opposite, in fact.
At a strategic level AQ is a symptom. Just as the Treaty of Versailles made a future war with Germany inevitable, so too did the US decision to let the programs, policies and relationships nurtured during 45 years of Cold War manipulations in the Middle East to simply ride into the future make conflict with the people of that region inevitable as well. The explosion of information technology was an accelerant. Like the collision of a cold (war) front and a warm front over a sea of the people – it brewed a perfect storm.
In the first case, if not Hitler and the Nazi ideology it would have been someone else with some other rallying message. In the second case, if not AQ and their Islamist ideology it would have been someone else with some similar message (Islam-based ideology seems to be the only flavor that works in the Middle East for rallying people to illegal political action).
Resistance insurgency is a natural human response. While it is easy to appreciate why Hitler triggered this human response in every single country he invaded during WWII (and to some degree we even concede why we triggered resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan), we have a harder time appreciating that not every inappropriate, illegitimate “occupation” need be physical. I think we understand the rise of AQ and the resonance their message has had across the greater Middle East in the post-Cold War era best if we consider the possibility that one can trigger this human response through an “occupy by policy” as well as by the more traditional physical occupations we normally associate with resistance movements.
Why is this important? Because if we want to reduce the likelihood of terrorism against the US we must address the source of energy fueling the problem in the first place. Widespread CT operations and invasions of nations we see as supporting or facilitating the UW operations AQ has been conducting to leverage this resistance energy have served primarily to make that energy stronger. Symptoms must be mitigated, not defeated. To attempt to defeat symptoms ignores the problem and allows it to grow unchecked at best – at worst, and we have been bad, such efforts make the problem worse and accelerate its growth.
In many ways, much of what President Obama has been doing in regards to turning his back on Mubarak, tempering the use of drones, looking for diplomatic solutions to Syria, acting in ways that tend to piss off Cold War partners such as the Israelis and the Saudis in general – all have done far more to reduce the energy of this occupation by policy than all of our military efforts over the past 12 years combined. The boss has good instincts, but we have no strategy to provide the framework or narrative necessary to guide and communicate the logic of those actions.
If we want to get to better results, we need to redefine the problem and then devise new strategies. Working harder and faster to execute flawed perspectives focused on symptoms, or rehashing 12-year old battles, is not going to help us finally turn the corner on this problem.
RCJ
Kabul, not Tora Bora, and Russia and Iran in addition to Iraq….
Careful, readers, you know my notes sometimes get mixed up but I think the following is correct:
Eric Margolis, War at the Top of the World: The struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet:
Laugh-Out-Loud. Your poor things in the military.
Isn’t this book on some “AfPak” military lists?
Mr. Gates is doing a nice job explaining the silliness of academia that the Obama administration brought in with it, about solving Kashmir and stabilizing Pakistan via aid and making the military and ISI feel more “secure” and grand regional plans that were bizarre in their ambition.
Usual American “South Asian” analyst and Ph.D. nonsense.
But what about the so-called Nixon wallahs (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.), the old Cold Warriors in D.C., the type that still viewed the world almost entirely through a “get Russia” and “get Iran” lens?
Is any of this in Mr. Gates book? And why did he think paying for the insurgency and the counterinsurgents at the same time would work? He’s not a stupid man. Why did he believe it? We were paying, via proxy, against our own men.
Pity is what I feel. This is what the Cold War did to a generation of national security officials. Slowly, bit by bit, you become accustomed to that which is an abomination. Robert Jones makes a related point about a standing Army in another thread; the slow way you are absorbed into the system emotionally and forget to question what you are doing.
What did Musharraf and others say to the Bush administration in the early days about Iran or the Russians? One wonders….
(Ah, my dear anti-war dot com types and The American Conservative types–of which I am one, so this is not against you AT all–you have your blind spots too. We all do. Everyone was mucking around in Kashmir and the Punjab and so on in one way or another doing the Cold War, so that your ideas about diplomacy forgot that we can’t be neutral outsiders, we Anglo-Americans, not to mention others.)
Remember how much fun people made of me here, or on other blogs, and on so-called COINTRA blogs in the early days? And yet, it’s all conventional wisdom now. So, for all my “crazy”, maybe I’m not such a loon….
OTOH, it’s all mixed up. What’s real? What isn’t?
Vali Nasr, Robert Gates, the lot, are coming out with books or blog posts at War on the Rocks. What is going on?
Taliban Retreat Takes war to the hills, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 1, 2001
Dec. 20 comment by Dave Maxwell to SWJ article: Counterinsurgency, Local Militias, and State building in Afghanistan:
“After a quick read of the report one of the shortfalls is that it does not assess the early efforts conducted by Special Forces in 2002-2004 with local indigenous forces. For the most part, the report focuses on 2008 and later….Any comprehensive assessment of these programs should include what really came before and efforts were abandoned due to lack of support by higher HQ….”
What really happened in the early days between Musharraf and the so-called “Nixon wallahs” (so called by me 🙂 ) in the Bush administration?
Iran was a preoccupation for many; how did the Saudis and Pakistanis and others barter with the US over this sort of thing behind the scenes?
Why did the American system accept what it did, long after it was clear we were funding both insurgency and counterinsurgency?
All the same patterns in Syria, in Egypt, closer to home for Mexico, all the same patterns of our national security class, and, in a way, its standard critics. When it’s a blind spot for the collective, it’s a blind spot for the collective….
As long as War on the Rocks is going all Kissinger for the moment, what about Khalistan and Kissinger? Not rehashing but trying to understand why the Western military intellectual class did not use an example that is most suited to the current environment where it’s all connected, state, non state, proxies and lobbies.
Why do you study that which is least likely to help you?
Crisis of Impunity: The Role of Pakistan, Russia and Iran in Fueling the Civil War (Human Rights Watch)
And the glorious Saudis who our system protects automatically because, well, the American system is about the system, its forgotten, the national security collective, that the American Constitution and the happiness, health and safety of its people matter more than the collective’s emotional and intellectual hard-on for its favored enemies. The Game. That’s what matters to you. So you focus on Snowden without realizing he could not exist without YOU.
Yeah, none of this is at all helpful to the present time, to Air Sea Battle or how the Army should be or anything the US is facing in this period. Sure, you all keep telling yourself that.
We built a web of connections and the connections are strangling us when they are not benefitting us. All at the same time. Anyone but a member of the collective can see it.
What am I supposed to do with stuff like this? It’s not wrong, necessarily, trade is good and can be stabilizing, but, still, what am I to do with it?
DAWN.COM
“Pakistan Ideal for Investment” March 22, 2006
“Let. Gen (retired) Mike DeLong, who is currently visiting Pakistan along with other executives of M/S Shaw briefed the Senate about their firm.”
I’m not singling anyone out, the Commonwealth, Brussels, China, Saudi, retired family living in the US from various nations, trade, all those connections that our military somehow thinks it doesn’t have to think about as it makes up a campaign. If these connections will stay, you need to think differently than the old ways.
Focusing on core concerns like Al Qaeda is Gian Gentile’s brilliance in his writing. I don’t actually agree with the so called COINTRAS on the way they look at the region, but the plan is brilliant because the spaghetti diagram of connections matter less in that plan.
It would be interesting to “mine” this book for Kabul and the Taliban topics, so-to-speak, as opposed to Tora Bora, as I’ve sort of attempted in this comment thread. The more interesting thing to me is the patterns set up by decision makers at the beginning and what connections might exist between our leaders and foreign officials. The great age of Davos-level emotional connectivity (and maturity) via leader-leader interaction:
“In 102 Days of War, Yaniv Barzilai takes the reader from meetings in the White House to the most sensitive operations in Afghanistan to explain how America’s enemies survived 2001. Using a broad array of sources, including interviews with U.S. officials at every level of the war, Barzilai concludes that the failure to destroy al Qaeda and kill bin Laden when he was cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora in Eastern Afghanistan was not only the result of a failure in tactics but, more importantly, the product of failures in policy and leadership.”
102 Days of War: How Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda & the Taliban Survived 2001 Hardcover
by Yaniv Barzilai (Author) , Bruce Riedel (Foreword) – Amazon Review
And the review of Robert Gates’ book at War on the Rocks has some interesting comments about the Bush administration and its view of Russia and how that might have affected the beginning of the campaign; too much focus of lack of resources and turning to Iraq as the only problem when some may have viewed the region as a chessboard in the old regional competitions left over from the Cold War?
The biggest failure in this mess was Gen Franks and the politicians who promoted him… Combined with poor civilian leadership and stupid, foolish and wasteful ROE rules, which cause us to fight one-handed and always have since WWII. Though I think interference by higher level civilian leadership, other than firing him would have been useless… We have come full circle, with Generals & Admirals making squad leader and company commander level decisions. Failing to trust subordinates, lack of common sense and politics caused us to miss an opportunity, again. Fear of the unknown and the boogyman, combined with risk aversion, fear of collateral damage, force caps, and a failure to move fast and hard at the decisive moment, caused this. Before Tora Bora, SOCOM ran the show. Conventional forces could have been employed and could have really helped but were not used. They didn’t need or want if muddled up by the “no hands in your pockets” crowd screaming about head gear. But when they got to a point conventional forces could have been useful, none got sent and those that did, were as usually poorly employed. Tora Bora could and should have been encircled. (If we were smart about send those who really need to jump, we could have two divisions. As the noose was emplaced, SOCOM could have pushed them out and into the traps. Fear prevented this from happening. Failing to trust in subordinate leadership prevented this from happening. Leading from the rear caused this to happen. The safety, safety, safety mindset contributed (our senior leaders fail to realize that while most of us are not suicidal, we didn’t join to be safe or we would be selling insurance.) Playing to the idea that Americans can’t stand casualties… We don’t like them, but if WWII was any indication, we can stand them. Failure to go in combined arms contributed.
The Bottom Line? Senior and political leaders failed (as usual) by acting like a bunch of old ladies. Trying to make an omelet without breaking eggs is never going to happen. If the politicians call on the military, then they have failed, they should provide an political end-state (not tactical, or operational one) and nothing more. Military Leaders should fight the battle, with all reasonable assets and means not try to stay on the good side of the politicians. One worrying about the next job, promotion, or over paid CEO job they are going to get. Win fast, win decisively and win are what America really wants.
You cannot be perfect. People who think they are deceiving themselves. So are military leaders. if you don’t want to make any mistakes, how are you going to learn, adapt or improve? That’s why we have senior leaders who won’t act, won’t risk and won’t win.
The failure of the Senior Leaders to unleash the full fury at the decisive time and place contributed has contributed to the state that America is in today. Blood and treasure has been spilt and spent, that didn’t need to be, if only the leadership had been willing to except some collateral damage, and take risk and active decisively. We can’t role back time, but I do have to wonder if we had got OBL at Tora Bora what would the state of the United States be today? We can never know that, but we can prevent it from ever happening again due to weak, politically motived, fearful leaders.
There is an article in the latest Small Wars and Insurgencies that should be read with my comments here (author Mahendrarajah). Pay particular attention toward the 2001 period and the Pashtun narrative favorited by the UN and the usual popular South Asian analysts heavily tilted toward a traditional Anglo American Pakistani narrative. Will flesh out this counter narrative with examples as I dig out 2001 notes….
And again the Nato-ization of American thought with the Bosnia model superimposed onto SA.
Conceptual failure traces to a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, where Lakhdar Brahimi, UN Special Representative for Afghanistan (2001–2004), Barnett Rubin, Ashraf Ghani, Ahmed Rashid, and two UN staffers dined in 2001. This was the kernel for the UN Strategy Group and the Security Council resolution empowering the UN to oversee Afghanistan’s transition.46 Brahimi’s core team included Ghani, Rubin, and Rashid. In December 2001, Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan. From 2002 to 2008, Francesc Vendrell was the EU Special Representative for Afghanistan.
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UN officials assigned to Afghanistan had Balkans experience. They saw a ‘failed state’ and myriad ethnicities, and ‘moved the Balkans template to Afghanistan.’47 They assigned quotas, coding political lists P (Pashtun), U (Uzbek), H (Hazara), etc.48 The UN was fixated on ethnicity, claiming Pashtuns were the largest demographic group and had the right to govern. Ahmed Rashid insisted that Pashtuns were alienated and had to govern. If not, he warned, there would be instability.49 This popular refrain was so Pashtuns could seize power from the Northern Alliance (NA) controlling Kabul. Rashid, et al. were effectively promoting Pakistan’s position: the Pak Foreign Ministry: ‘Pakistan continues to hold the view that the Northern Alliance must not occupy Kabul…’; it was a ‘strategic debacle’ for Pakistan when the NA occupied Kabul (2001). They insisted, ‘[i]f the current situation is allowed to persist for long it could lead to civil war as in the past.’50 They feared Ahmad Shah Masoud’s (d. 2001) party, Jamiat-i Islami, and interpreted the Shiite parties as Iranian proxies. ISI knew it could not control NA, and most importantly, that NA was strongly anti-Taliban. The US was methodically nudged toward a policy where it rejected its NA allies.
This is from the paper I mentioned and I wanted to incorporate this excerpt here, not because I want to argue its correctness, but to think about what really happened during that period and whether the standard contra vs coindinista, taliban versus al quaeda, narratives are enough? What else are we missing and how does this relate to the changed state today, after 13 years? So much of the discussion here is static and identity is shallow, one ethnicity or tribe and that’s it. So too with academic works or wonks. The paper mentions an entire world of authorities and academics beyond those usually discussed.
And the editors so nicely provided that paper to the public, yet it’s not as widely read as some others. What a shame when the editors have been so very generous.
I posted the following comment in another thread and it belongs here too:
“
Not just Musharraf, the CIA too. The American military has been publicly flogged for its COIN doctrine, yet the CIA through the NSA has been rewarded, likely because the drone debate has been framed in a way that doesn’t get at the CIA’s traditional failings in this region.”
What was that article about Erik Prince that mentioned in passing how Pakistan was privileged by the American intelligence community over building up intelligence institutions in Afghanistan? Very much in keeping with the Foreign Policy Article by Stephen Walt on Counterterrosim Counterfactuals. Will post when I get the chance. The important thing about the article wasn’t Erik Prince, it was the off-hand comment about Crumpton and others? I have to find that article….
Well, when I’m in line at the market or whatever, I get bored and read. What am I supposed to do, read about the Kardashians? Please stop doing that everyone, if you don’t click on the links, they may go away.
*He being Hussian Haqqani in a Seymour Hersch New Yorker article.
Drill, melted away, whatever:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/20-Nov-2014/pakistan-s-afghan-policy-arsonist-or-fireman?utm_content=buffer5a11d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
It’s interesting to think about it as a drill, isn’t it?
Yes, we all know I wouldn’t go away. I posted this as part of a comment at Zenpundit (I have made minor changes):
Over the years, I’ve collected statements about “the Pashtun problem” within the American media, especially in the very early days of the Afghan campaign. It’s fascinating. Again, a bit like Kashmir where an entire complicated conflict was reduced to the Valley and the most radical elements of the separatist movement, elements with cross border ties. It’s not about taking sides between Pashtuns and anti-Pashtuns, but the way in which the most radical elements were portrayed as localized insurgents and more moderate elements were pushed to the side.
It’s interesting that both so called Coindinistas and Cointras fell into this trap, in addition to many other factions within the American Foreign Policy apparatus. The Cointras fell for the propaganda because they didn’t think we should even be in Afghanistan while the Coindinistas thought that they WERE fighting a proxy war by trying to split the insurgency. Instead, they lost control of the process because they alienated others as they tried to entice moderate Taliban and cultivate Pakistan.
Nothing new here, but it is interesting to go back and look at the statements by American officials in the very early days of the campaign.
Gen. Mattis, in a talk on YouTube says that the entire ground campaign of those early days wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the Pakistanis. True, but as many other commentators have said, the concessions they extracted likely included some kind of promise that they could remove some of their people from Kunduz and perhaps even that they should be the ones to seal the border at Tora Bora. Perhaps that is why requests were denied.
Nothing new, nothing new, except that there is still something very strange about the way in which the entire conflict became viewed through the eyes of the most radical elements of one party within a larger conflict.
Is the same process happening right now with Syria and Iraq? Are we again misframing the situation, and partly because of outside interference?
So this is interesting:
a quote from General Mattis in Esquire (2010, Tom Barnett article)
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306MONKS_214
I messed up a little in a previous comment. The sequence was this, wasn’t it:
1. Negotiation for logistics through Pakistan in a trade for the dropping of sanctions and various aid packages. Plus, the pattern was set for the American military in terms of “we will argue against you in public but in private we will support you,” which brought in the American military psychologically in interesting ways, even if inadvertent or unplanned.
2. Permission for the Kunduz airlift from President Bush or Cheney (?, different stories) because Musharraf had said he was vulnerable and needed the help.
To date, the quietness over this in relation to the attention given to Tora Bora is a bit odd. It occurs to me that it might not be a bad thing for various parties if the focus is on Tora Bora.
In terms of strategic depth, isn’t one aspect falling back with assets, evacuating to a different place to plan a future offensive? If you look at it that way, what do we see in those initial weeks after 9/11?
Half fighting, half retreating, all in the name of future assets to be used if needed. And information from joint planning from the very beginning? Whether from the top or from “rogues”, either way, from the beginning, the false narratives on South Asia that were a part of the American psyche were major problem.
From Page 53 of Barzilai’s book; I always thought there was something weird about Kabul and our approach to it:
Chapter 5, The Strategic Void:
That excerpt shows that our system has not, really, ever got a handle on that initial strategic confusion and most of my comments in this section–and others–have tried to understand how certain attitudes about that part of the world have taken hold within the Washington establishment, to include plain old ignorance compounded by a traditionally small and rather odd South Asian analytical and scholarly community.
On page 73 in the same book, there is a map titled “Major U.S. Special Forces Operations” and it has a drawing within the map of a “kill box”. The “back” of the “kill box” (its eastern and southern aspects outside of the box, outside Kabul, so to speak) is, oddly, a physical representation of the blankness of the strategic confusion of that initial period, carried into today.
Add to that physical blankness, the various maps from Peter Tomsen’s book The Wars of Afghanistan, the maps discussing the major Taliban offensives. It’s almost as if you can take these maps from the two books and lay them on top of each other. Then, add labels with the different camps within the American system and trace their intellectual histories and how each camp viewed the “blank” spaces:
Why was the Pashtun question of such central importance in an initial military campaign of destruction, and why was that equated with the governance structures that were to take place? Should they have been? Could it have been otherwise? Or no? Is it simply impossible that any other actions could have taken place realistically?
Why would destroying the leadership that had hosted Al Qaeda–with introductions to the Taliban from the Pakistanis and Saudis during the 90s, a key point when considering what happened, outside the question of insurgencies and stability–be the same as excluding the actual people of the South from governance in a new constitution?
Whether NATO Turkey, traditional “ally” Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan (with its strange elite relationships to various Western camps), we have the continual problem of deciding what our American interests are and how far we are going to go in accommodating allies. The military in particular seems to view ally management as an end in itself.
Bruce Reidel asks for empathy to the initial shock felt by the decision makers and the pressure all were under. A valuable point.
The questions remain, however, and today you can find anything you like as you look at the situation on a regional and global level:
1. Negotiations with Iran, and Pakistan’s desires in that regard, balancing Chinese and Saudi patrons.
2. Complicated relationships with Russia that still have some common interests in this region.
3. China finally acknowledged as an important player that has allied with the Pakistanis as their proxy, against more than one party, regionally and globally.
4. The Indians turning east and starting a new relationship with the US.
5. The Saudis attempting to court the Indians in a different way than, er, the past, when the Iran-Saudi rivalry contributed to violence in Kashmir.
6. American domestic political fears (politician and military), fearing a repeat of what is going on in Iraq and so extending an American presence, which might calm a different faction that the southern faction, so to speak.
Doesn’t it all seem strange, the things many of you–me too–were taught, about the region, all mostly haphazard left overs from the Cold War.
Any one want to go back and look at my questions about Kabul and blocking the NA? Non Western sites are full of theories….the reporting is hilarious too. Why the world will fall apart if the Taliban are kicked out without a Pashtun faction! Yea, let’s see the ‘it is only a localized insurgency crowd’ go back and look at its past analysis. The partisan American political types. The local is embedded in the regional and the global.