Rose Tinted Garbage From Petraeus

The recent reports circulating in Washington’s national security establishment about the Afghan battleground of Marja suggest glimmerings of progress: bazaars open, 1,000 children are in school, and a new (and only) restaurant even serves goat curry and kebabs. Officials report progress against the Taliban in Marja, Afghanistan, where United States Marines patrolled in September.
In Kandahar, NATO officials say that American and Afghan forces continue to 'rout' the Taliban. In new statistics offered by American commanders in Kabul, Special Operations units have killed '339 midlevel Taliban commanders' and 949 of the group’s foot soldiers in the past three months alone?! At the Pentagon, the leaked draft of a war assessment to be submitted to Congress this month cites a shift in momentum in some areas of the country away from the insurgency.
But as a new White House review of President Obama’s 'strategy' in Afghanistan and Pakistan gets under way, the rosy signs have opened an intense debate at the Defense Department, the White House, the State Department and the intelligence agencies over what they really mean. Are they indications of future success, are they fleeting and not replicable, do they exist at all, or are they evidence that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is simply more masterful than his predecessor at shaping opinion?
At the White House, so far there is uncertainty and skepticism. “There are tactical cases which seem promising as discrete bits of evidence,” a senior White House official said in an interview over the weekend. “What’s not clear is whether those cases can be put together to create a strategic trend.” Marja, he added, “looks a lot better than two years ago. But how many Marjas do we need to do and over what time frame?”
The debate centers on the resiliency of the Taliban and the extent to which the group can rebuild from the hammering it is taking. Most involved say that there are positive trends for the Americans, but that the real answer will not be clear until a new fighting season begins as the weather warms next year.
“The fundamental question is how deep is their bench,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who led last year’s extended White House review of Afghan strategy that resulted in Mr. Obama’s ordering 30,000 additional United States forces to the country. “By next summer we should have a pretty good idea. If they’re having trouble replacing people that we’re killing on the battlefield, then we’re on the right track. But if by next summer they’re producing new cadres that are on the same order of quality, then we’re in deep trouble.”
A related variable is the uneven quality of more than 250,000 members of the Afghan Army and police. “There’s absolutely no question that where Petraeus’s troops have moved, they have done the Taliban immense damage,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “What is not yet clear is whether it will be sustainable, and that will depend on the success of the effort to train the Afghan security forces.”
Another question is what impact killing so many midlevel Taliban commanders will have on American efforts to pressure the group’s top leaders to negotiate an end to the war. They are talking already of course (see previous). United States commanders are encouraged by radio intercepts showing, they claim, Taliban fighters demoralized and angry that their senior leaders remain in havens in Pakistan, which theoretically could make the Taliban more willing to make a deal. But intelligence experts view the intercepts as anecdotal at best and the usual NATO bollocks at worst.
The White House official said that wiping out midlevel Taliban fighters might have unintended consequences. “Are these guys being replaced by guys less beholden to the senior leaders in Pakistan?” the official said. If that is the case, in any future peace talks, “it’s possible that the leaders at the top could not deliver.”
Military officials for the most part take a more optimistic view and intelligence officials a more pessimistic view of recent developments in the war. In part the difference is cultural — the job of the intelligence analyst is to not be surprised by bad news — but deep doubts about the war remain imbedded in the spy agencies.
In the past year the C.I.A. has delivered a number of sober assessments about worsening violence in Afghanistan and the growing strength of the Taliban. Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., has been dismissive in public statements about nascent peace talks, saying that Taliban leaders have no incentive to strike a deal because they believe they are winning the war.
A senior United States official familiar with intelligence on Afghanistan reflected that view last week. “The Taliban have shown an ability to adapt their tactics quickly and are a very patient bunch,” he said. “They sometimes fan out when the going gets tough for them and then coalesce to mount resistance.”
A former C.I.A. official with longtime experience in Afghanistan said that the recent statements about American progress in Afghanistan reminded him of what was sometimes written about the Russians before they began withdrawing from Afghanistan in defeat in 1988, when they had been at war there for nearly 10 years.

“I don’t find many people I talk to who really believe any of this,” he said.

The military’s more positive view is hardly monolithic; doubts also exist within its ranks. The Defense Department’s coming war assessment says that violence once again increased in Afghanistan in the past year, in large part because of the aggressive American military operations in the south, while Pentagon officials readily acknowledge that security has deteriorated in previously quiet areas of the north.
But commanders on the ground in the south repeatedly say they have seen tactical progress in recent months. “There’s no safe location in Marja where you can say, 100 percent, I’m not going to get shot at,” Lt. Col. Kyle Ellison, commander of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, said in an interview in September at a base in Marja, a 75-square-mile swath of farming villages in Helmand Province that was the site of a major NATO and Afghan offensive in February. “But when we first got here, you couldn’t walk outside this gate without getting a shot.”
Last week a team led by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s Afghanistan adviser at the White House, returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan with data that will serve as a basis for Mr. Obama’s review of the war next month. General Petraeus is also assembling masses of data.
“It is certainly true that Petraeus is attempting to shape public opinion ahead of the December review,” said an administration official who is supportive of the general.
“He is the most skilled public relations official in the business, and he’s trying to narrow the president’s options.”
But national security officials across Washington are already saying that the December review will only tweak the policy, not change the strategy, and that the real assessment will come in July 2011, the deadline for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops. Not much coherence in occupation force, eh?

Apologies for the rag bag of this post. Partly down to my own lack of time partly down to the shills and MSM mouthpieces for the Pentagon from whom I ripped the quotes and partly down to the fact that it is a description of a shambles on the ground.