Unfortunate Quote of the Day

From a Cory Flintoff NPR piece on the challenges of training the Afghan army:

When asked why he had led his men ahead without telling the Marines, the Afghan captain, Mohammed Gharib, said his men had spotted a teenage boy in the area and wanted to check him out.

More Marjah Madness

One of the things that most disturbs me about my job is how otherwise thoughtful people somehow manage to jump off the Reason Train short of Plausible Junction, taking a sizable number of otherwise sane bloggers with them.

Case in point this week is Gareth Porter at Anti-War.com, who has somehow managed to convince himself and a bunch of people repeating his post that briefings and press accounts describing the rural community of Marjah as a "town" or "city" was somehow a misinformation campaign by the evil militarists of 40-plus nations who are committed to eroding their political support by duping the public into extending an unpopular war in the hopes of killing as many brown people as possible. Or something like that. A search for clear motives tends to muddle an otherwise pristine paranoia.

Gareth's argument is supported by an ISAF official "who asked not to be identified" confirming that Marjah is a "rural community" -- which adds to the air of a secret plot revealed. Except there's no secret. The official was me, and I didn't ask to be quoted anonymously.

The rest of my dismay is in my email to Gareth, quoted here in full:

Gareth,

I swore to myself I'd just drop this, but your earnestness on a fairly trivial matter is irresistible. You do in fact have small cities or large towns roughly the size and population of Marjah as the Marines described it. Not normally where I come from in Pennsylvania, true. But my wife's hometown -- Lawton, Oklahoma, home of the US Army's Fort Sill -- is described by its residents as a "city" of 93,000 people spread out over about 195 square kilometers--in other words, almost exactly like Marjah in size and population density. And typing in "town 200 square kilometers" in Google, I clicked right through to Shuangshui "Town" in Guangdong Province, China (about the same size and population of Lawton) and the "town" of Markham, Ontario, Canada (which really should be a "city" if there's a definable standard for the term, since it has more than twice the population of Lawton spread over 212 square kilometers).

I'm sure all these locations are guilty of "information war" in the sense of civic boosterism, but I also think it demonstrates that the terms have no precise meaning and therefore don't imply some kind of malicious intent when used with respect to Marjah.

At this point, I think any further objections will only serve to fuel greater suspicions of some kind of linguistic conspiracy on your part. I just have to say that for someone who strikes me as a very thoughtful guy, you've done your readers a disservice by creating a pseudo-issue when so many real issues about Afghanistan are under-reported.

Rocket's Dead Blare

James Bays of Al Jazeera English is probably the best television reporter working on any given day in Afghanistan, which is why I was disappointed to watch the public unspooling of his obsession with a dud rocket that landed 4 kilometers from Marjah during President Karzai's historic visit there today. You get some taste for it in the Al Jaz print story, but on live TV it resembled a hymn to the intelligence and operational effectiveness of the Taliban.

Like the Western reporters I escorted on the visit, I can confirm there was never any danger. Beyond establishing the facts on the ground, though, the report is illustrative of the interpretive bias of too many reporters here.

Let's say the President attends a public meeting, and many people -- including his opponents -- know about it. If the President is Obama, then that's publicity. If the President is Karzai, then that's the sign of a sophisticated intelligence network. A large number of heavily armed men hate the President, want to kill him, and are able to express their rage impotently, miles away from their target. If we are talking gun-toting wingnuts and President Obama, then we assume the good guys did their job. If we are talking Taliban and President Karzai, then we attribute it to the prowess of the bad guys. People venting their frustrations to an American politician is a healthy exercise in civic responsibility. People venting their frustrations to an Afghan politician is an indication of hopelessness, corruption ... pick your malaise.

This is not to say that Marjah is completely secure and without deep social problems. It is neither of those things. And precisely because it is neither of those things, it's not necessary to peer at places like Marjah through shit-colored glasses to convince people you're being objective. Leave the rockets where they lie: far away from the real story.

How Is Ravin' Like FP's Writing Desk?

I don't agree with the "Down the AF-PAK Rabbit Hole," but props from one reformed Victorian lit student to Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason in Foreign Policy for going deep in the first quarter to come up with this lede:

The release of Tim Burton's new blockbuster movie, Alice in Wonderland, is days away. The timing could not be more appropriate. Lewis Carroll's ironically opium-inspired tale of a rational person caught up inside a mad world with its own bizarre but consistent internal (il)logic has now surpassed Vietnam as the best paradigm to understand the war in Afghanistan.

Other than the English geek observation that Alice wasn't so much inspired by opium use, why disagree with the authors? Because Marjah is not as they claim a "nearly worthless postage stamp of real estate" that is being secured in "a giant public affairs exercise, designed to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating an illusion of progress." The geographic area of Operation Moshtarak -- much larger than the town of Marjah that has become the media shorthand for the offensive -- connects two larger areas of the Central Helmand River Valley previously secured by U.S. and U.K. forces. Insurgents had turned the area into a safe haven for operations against Afghans and international forces, including what was the primary point of manufacture for the improvised explosive devices used in southern Afghanistan.

In other words, the Marjah "postage stamp" was on a letter bomb addressed to the Afghan people as well as the young men and women of more than 40 nations serving here. Securing this area means establishing a contiguous zone of security in the popular and economic heart of the Taliban insurgency -- which is exactly what the political and military strategy laid out for Afghanistan says we should do. Operation Moshtarak isn't the alpha and omega of stability in Afghanistan. But it's not a bad start.

There's no shame in using real success consistent with strategy to boost public support of the strategy, because you're not creating false hope. You're reflecting real hope. What's being peddled in Afghanistan right now is not the illusion of progress but the gen-u-wine article. How long will our policy and media elites remain so bitter about the Bush era that they're unwilling to buy it?

McChrystal on Moshtarak

Money Talks

Where would we be without the moral compass of punditry? This week, we would be in a world where it was O.K. to "buy off" the Taliban with the $500 million reportedly pledged at this week's London Conference for reintegration efforts in Afghanistan. Thank you, pundits, for saving us from this error. How silly to think that after eight years of trying to solve the country's problems with violence that something as simple as a little more money might be worth a shot.

Although critics have done their best by using loaded terms such as "bribe" to discuss reintegration, the actual arguments against the initiative aren't very strong.

The first is that reintegration hasn't worked yet in Afghanistan. In Newsweek, for example, Ron Moreau contends that past Taliban defectors "now live hand-to-mouth in Kabul, exiled from their home villages." Well, yes, because without an adequate national reintegration program and forces sufficient to clear and hold areas from Taliban control, bringing former fighters back into their local communities with alternative means of economic support wasn't an option. Now it is.

The second argument is that reintegration of Taliban fighters is not possible because of their extreme worldview. Although this is doubtlessly true of a minority of insurgents who will choose to fight to the bitter end, General McChrystal is also right to observe that "a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome." Canada's Globe and Mail chided McChrystal for dipping his toe into politics and history with that remark, citing Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II as an example of violence alone ending a conflict with a population seized by a totalitarian ideology.

Assuming for a moment that the Afghan equivalent of 60 million dead from this kind of total war was desirable, what would come after such a bloodier victory? There is always a price tag for stability. In the case of World War II, stability in Europe alone cost $13 billion for the Marshall Plan (5% of the U.S. GDP at the time, or the equivalent of $710 billion today), plus another $12 billion in aid granted before the start of the Plan, plus (if you want to take the long view) the cost of the Cold War. If a lot of money after six years of devastation cured Europe of fascism and produced the greatest foreign policy success of the century, then after 30 years of devastation is there any reason to dismiss reintegration funds so readily as a cure for Talibanism in Afghanistan?

The third argument against reintegration is the most persuasive: that it is simply too early to negotiate. Taliban insurgents are arguably at the height of their power since 2001. Why talk now? The gamble is that the Taliban recognize that there already has been a clear shift in momentum toward Afghan and coalition forces -- signified most clearly by U.S. and European commitments of thousands of additional personnel and an Afghan force increasingly able to thwart and contain insurgent violence, as demonstrated during recent attacks in Kabul and Lashkar Gah. As insurgents feel the squeeze from increasingly effective operations against them, they may come to covet what reintegration offers: not simply cash, but a way out of the fight through job skills they can apply to projects that will help them rebuild shattered communities.

It may indeed be too early for many insurgents to reach this conclusion. But it's also not clear that backing them into a corner -- offering them no alternative but to fight, kill and die for a lost cause -- is a better solution.

Watchmen: Cable Guy, the Sequel

Here is my favorite line from this morning's New York Times story by Eric Schmitt on the two cables sent in November by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry to senior officials involved in President Obama's Afghanistan strategy review:

... the strong language of the cables may increase tensions between the ambassador and the Karzai government, especially as world leaders meet in London on Thursday to discuss a much-debated Afghan plan to reintegrate Taliban fighters.

At least, we can only hope that the leak will increase those tensions, because any fireworks at the London Conference and the ensuing recriminations in Kabul would make for great copy in the Times.

I had started to get over my previous sour note about the quality of reporting on Afghanistan, until I came across this example of conflict obsession, political category. The substance of the Ambassador's cables leaked when they mattered: during the strategy deliberations. What's the purpose of leaking them in full this week? Because it's "important for the historical record that Mr. Eikenberry’s detailed assessments be made public," as the high-minded Times source suggested? Because if the Times didn't, someone else would? Because the putrid stench of a dead controversy remains irresistible, even on the cusp of a possible political breakthrough that would help resolve the conflict in Afghanistan?

We can only speculate on the motivations, but one thing is clear. Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., now has the inside track on next year's Nobel Peace Prize.