General David Petraeus still lying about progress

Gareth Porter has uncovered a US military document that confirms Gen. Petraeus misled Americans repeatedly in 2010 about supposed progress under his command. It is part of a long pattern of seemingly deliberate deception by Petraeus.

The document, a graph from Task Force 435, demonstrates that the vast majority of Afghans captured during the 2010 surge, initially identified as Taliban fighters, were released by the US military within two weeks. The rate of release within 2 weeks was about 80%. It’s something that the Task Force commander himself acknowledged publicly last November. Porter calculates that subsequent reviews by the US military led to the release of at least another 10% of those initial prisoners within a few months. So the US military recognized that its operations in 2010 had detained large numbers of innocents and no more than 10% of these prisoners were actually associated with the Taliban.

But David Petraeus suppressed that information. Instead, in August 2010 and then again in December 2010 Petraeus released the inflated figures for prisoners and pretended that these represented the number of Taliban fighters who’d been captured. In other words, he deliberately misled the public by reporting 10 times as many Taliban fighters in custody as were actually captured.

Petraeus’ numbers for Talibans killed may also be inflated, though there is no documentation available to serve as a check on those assertions.

Petraeus has a record of deceiving the public. In 2007, when he was under pressure to show progress after six months of the surge in Iraq, Petraeus made a deceptive presentation to Congress. Though that presentation was greatly hyped in advance, it turned out to be extremely flimsy. He provided no written report, and instead showed Congress a series of slides that purported to represent progress in suppressing violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad.

The problem was, as I revealed at the time, Petraeus’ slides for rates of violence in Baghdad were deceptive. They color-coded the city neighborhoods by sectarian majorities, and on Petraeus’ slides those neighborhoods all remained unchanged during the surge. That was a falsification of the largest factor in the ongoing civil war, the ongoing sectarian cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods – which reached a peak during the very period Petraeus was reporting upon.

The Pentagon had already produced accurate slides portraying violence on correctly color-coded neighborhoods (for the so-called Jones Report). So it is hard to see why Petraeus’ slides should have been so deceptive on such a basic issue – unless deception was the goal.

In April 2008 Petraeus returned to give Congress another report on progress in Iraq. This time, without explanation or apology for his previously misleading presentation, Petraeus showed slides of Baghdad that were accurately color-coded. Substituting accurate for inaccurate slides was a tacit admission that his earlier presentation had been deceptive.

In his September 2007 testimony to Congress, Petraeus was also accused of relying on selective statistics for sectarian violence, with the purpose of exaggerating the progress achieved under his command.

There appears to be a pattern of falsification by General Petraeus.

crossposted at unbossed.com

How do you subdue a people who will fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

Herodotus records a Delphic oracle warning the early Spartans against trying to subdue Arcadia “where men eat acorns”. When the Spartan military marched into Arcadia anyway, they met disaster. Acorn-foraging became a by-word for the ruggedness of the famously indomitable population in that remote mountainous region.

So I took notice when I came across this SIGACT among the nearly 92,000 Afghan war documents published yesterday. It’s a report of September 2007 from the remote province of Nuristan, along the Pakistan border. This region was the setting for Kipling’s “The man who would be king”. Here’s the part of the report that caught my attention:

There is a feud/civil conflict developing between 3 villages (Nanglam, Mashpah, and Malel) over pine nut foraging rights. 1 Afghan national has been killed, and 2 injured. Waliswol Muhammad Ali is attempting to mediate.

So how does anybody imagine that coalition forces can ever impose their will upon a population that is willing to fight to the death over pine nut foraging rights?

A simple question encompassing a world of problems for the US-led occupation. Afghans are desperately poor, their economy rudimentary, and their society rough hewn. They fight to defend their honor and minor slights can lead to feuds lasting generations. Even where ethnic and sectarian rivalries are absent, such as in Nuristan, social fractures between families and villages are the very stuff of the social fabric. I cannot conceive why any outsiders would suppose they could ever bend such people to their will.

Indeed Nuristan now is firmly back under Taliban rule. Americans increasingly came under brutal attack in the province, as a 2008 document singled out the by NY Times shows. Less than a year after this report, the US military suffered its worst casualties of the war in an attack at the village of Wanat. A little more than a year later, the US withdrew all its forces from the province after one base was nearly overrun.

For all the confusion of bad intelligence and chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, the evidence of these Wikileaks documents could hardly be clearer about one thing: Coalition forces are way out of their depth in trying to get a purchase on rural Afghan society.

crossposted at unbossed.com

The New Pentagon Papers

The nearly 92,000 secret documents from 6 years of US military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, obtained by Wikileaks and published simultaneously today by the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel, bring to mind nothing so much as the Pentagon Papers published in 1971. They’re a very different kind of dossier, of course. The latter was an official Defense Dept. study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The current dossier is more random – and thus in many ways more enlightening - a trove of on-the-ground reports from military and intelligence operations.

But what it shares in common with the Pentagon Papers is this: It provides a devastating portrait of

• a disastrous guerilla war that the public had already turned decisively against


• military operations that both tactically and strategically are a mess beyond any reasonable hope of repair


• intelligence operations that are acquiring almost no accurate, much less actionable, information about anything


• American officials who appear to have no answers to the daily intractable problems they face in an increasingly unpopular occupation


• an Afghan population that has huge and legitimate grievances against heavy-handed US attacks


• an Afghan government that is corrupt, incompetent, and mistrusted in more ways than most of us could have imagined


• grossly untrustworthy Afghan army and police forces


• obscenely fraught relations with our untrustworthy “allies” in the region


• an enemy that is better armed and more adaptable and successful than the public has been told


• the history of a war that went to pieces far earlier than the US government had told the public


• specific details about military operations that contradict what the US public had been told in the past

In short, just as with the Pentagon Papers, it is nearly impossible to read through the current dossier and conclude that this occupation is winnable; that the US military ever has had a coherent plan; that the government that American lives are being sacrificed for is solid, trustworthy, or has integrity; that our forces really know what is going on in the country they’re bogged down in; or that the US government has been honest about what we face there.

So the publication of these documents could prove to be a turning point in US involvement in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers proved to Americans, even to people who hadn’t been paying close attention to policy debates about the Vietnam War, that they’d been deceived for years by their own government’s grossly misleading public assessments of the situation there. The publication of these New Pentagon Papers ought to produce the same result.

The difference between 2010 and 1971, however, is that in an earlier day Americans in large numbers were prepared to sit down and read and discuss the secret documents. Today, I’m not so sure they’ll even bother. After all, virtually none of these documents fall below the 140-character threshold that appears to constitute the limit to attention spans in the US these days.

In addition, almost the entire Republican caucus in Washington is devoted to the idea that the single policy of Barack Obama’s that they can support is his decision (twice) to escalate the war in Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine the opposition party allowing these unwelcome new facts to influence in any way their proud advocacy for an open-ended war on the Asian continent. I rather doubt that many in Congress from the President’s own party will want to embarrass him about the depressing picture these documents portray.

Obama himself, the last time he doubled the troops in Afghanistan (in December 2009), emphatically denied that Afghanistan was like Vietnam.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

His administration certainly won’t be eager now to discuss whether Afghanistan is a quagmire. Even less will it want to allow public debate to be dominated by the apparent parallelism in the leaking of embarrassing documents that undercut the rationale for war. Not surprisingly, as soon as the world press reported on this dossier the White House released a statement denouncing the act of journalism as such rather than addressing the many concerns that readers of these documents would legitimately have.

I note in passing that on the main page of the White House website, under the heading ‘Issues’ you will find neither ‘Afghanistan’ nor ‘War’ (though ‘Rural’ and ‘Family’ both are somehow considered significant ‘Issues’).

So I guess we shall see whether the publication of the New Pentagon Papers has the effect that by rights it should have upon the course of this failed occupation.

In closing, I’d note the thing that struck me (as an historian) most forcefully about this trove of documents. I’ve already alluded to it. Nearly all the human intelligence gathered in the region by the US and evidently a good deal of the signal intelligence is highly fictionalized and therefore worthless - except as a reflection upon how grave our forces’ problems are there. Informants have many reasons to make things up, they’ve figured out what they can sell to us (some of this preposterous information is actually paid for), and US forces don’t have much reliable information to apply in testing the credibility of its sources. The task for Americans in Afghanistan is very much like trying to track a criminal suspect through a carnival hall of mirrors; something is going on, but who can say for sure what, where, when. This report from the Guardian is the best I’ve seen at highlighting that aspect of the documentary record:

Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.

A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. "As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim," said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.

If anything, the jumble of allegations highlights the perils of collecting accurate intelligence in a complex arena where all sides have an interest in distorting the truth.

"The fog of war is particularly dense in Afghanistan," said Michael Semple, a former deputy head of the EU mission there. "A barrage of false information is being passed off as intelligence and anyone who wants to operate there needs to be able to sift through it. The opportunities to be misled are innumerable."

[…]

Afghanistan has a long history of intelligence intrigues that stretches back to the early 19th century. Afghans have learned to use intelligence as a tool to influence the foreign powers occupying their land. In the past quarter century it has become a lucrative source of income in a country with few employment opportunities.

As many on-the-ground truths as can be found by digging through the New Pentagon Papers, there are at least an equal number of on-the-ground fabrications, falsifications, and frauds. Lies can be as revealing as truths, but only if you’re willing to look the lies square in the face.



crossposted from unbossed.com

Say goodnight to President Petraeus

Today Gen. David Petraeus was being questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the quagmire in Afghanistan. As John McCain bemoaned that the US was planning not to extend indefinitely the surge Petraeus had wanted (on which see yesterday’s PR blitz by the Pentagon about vast Afghan mineral wealth), the general suddenly gawped and fainted. The hearing was suspended for a day to allow Petraeus to recover. He claimed afterwards that he was simply dehydrated…as if there were no beakers of water around.

With this public relations catastrophe, it’s now much less likely that Petraeus will be able to convert his apparent presidential ambitions into reality. For one thing, it raises further concerns about Petraeus’ physical fitness. Anyhow it’s simply not presidential to faint when you’re being asked difficult questions about your job performance, especially for a general. And, yes, Petraeus is painfully aware that his failure to stem the tide in Afghanistan is going to be a huge obstacle in his further ambitions.

I’ve never bought the hype about Petraeus’ supposed military genius and capabilities.

General Petraeus had built up the local police by recruiting officers who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein's security apparatus.

Although Mosul remained quiet for some months after, the US suffered one of its worse setbacks of the war in November 2004 when insurgents captured most of the city. The 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m (£20m) worth of military equipment disappeared. Iraqi army units abandoned their bases.

The general's next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. As head of the Multinational Security Transition Command, General Petraeus claimed that his efforts were proving successful. In an article in The Washington Post in September 2004, he wrote: "Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established." This optimism turned out be misleading; three years later the Iraqi army is notoriously ineffective and corrupt.

General Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Iraq's Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, said. "Huge amounts of money disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

In any case Gen. Petraeus’ regular interference in domestic politics, such as his infamous op-ed published late in the 2004 presidential campaign, and even more his intrusion into the political debates regarding proposed surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been dangerous for our democracy. The Founders of our Republic were rightly worried that military officers’ ambitions would destabilize the nation. Petraeus has not only pushed his ambitions to an extreme not seen perhaps since Douglas MacArthur, he has even gone so far as to provide misleading testimony to Congress to further those ambitions. In his September 2007 testimony on the surge in Iraq, Petraeus used falsified maps that seemed designed specifically to obscure the extent of ethno-sectarian cleansing that had gone on in Bagdad while he was in command. Petraeus has never alerted Congress to that falsification much less publicly corrected his testimony.

I don’t trust the man, and I’ll be happy to see any presidential ambitions go quietly into the night.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Vast deposits of naïveté discovered in America

This morning political commentators are all atwitter about James Risen’s NYT article about mineral reserves charted in Afghanistan by a USGS survey. In years to come these reserves could turn Afghanistan into another Saudi Arabia, we’re told. Bloggers have lapped this “news” up.

Risen presents the information as if he had a major scoop.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

In fact, however, the survey was conducted between 2004 and 2007. Risen claims that it’s results were ignored until recently, when the Pentagon “came upon” the geological survey data while looking for ways to boost the country’s economy.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

Utter nonsense. In 2007 the Afghan government touted the survey to the world. In the time since then, it has been working to attract international developers for its copper and iron reserves – which appear to be the most valuable and accessible ones. Already in 2007 a Chinese company won a competition to lease the largest copper mine, agreeing to pay the Afghan government $400 million per year in taxes.

It’s hard to conceive that in the foreseeable future Afghanistan will be able to derive more than a few billion dollars per year in taxes/mineral royalties by exploiting its reserves to the fullest possible extent. For comparison, the current Afghan GDP is thought to be around $16 billion. In 2007, the UNODC estimated that opium accounted for half of the country’s ‘licit’ GDP, or about $4 billion. So mining is not going to turn Afghanistan into a rich state much less eliminate the opium trade.

Risen and his sources are trying to sell us a pipe dream.

The fact that the USGS survey is being recycled now as "news" tells you everything you need to know about how grim the actual news coming out of Afghanistan has become this year. The Pentagon “heroes” of Risen’s story are selling this “news” to (a) buy time with the US public for military policies that are failing in the field, and (b) distract attention from the fact that America is doubling down on behalf of a corrupt, ineffective, and illegitimate Karzai government. If Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth, as we’re supposed to believe, then perhaps it makes slightly more sense (in a blood-for-copper kind of way) that the US now appears to be committed to staying there forever.

The genesis of this NYT article can be attributed to the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda machinery, as Marc Ambinder at least recognizes to his credit.

The way in which the story was presented -- with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less -- and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.

That could hardly be clearer. The narrative as presented by Risen is bizarrely slanted in favor of the Pentagon, and furthermore is full of glaring holes. What’s more the outdated “news” is being recycled in a way that is highly reminiscent of the DoD’s standard operating procedures under the Bush administration, whenever it needed to distract attention.

What it shows is that the US government thinks we’re suckers. The reaction of commentators to Risen’s “blockbuster” suggests that the government has pretty much got it right.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Obama: We’ll be in Afghanistan forever

Consider these two starkly juxtaposed sentences from President Obama’s West Point speech tonight:

And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

That makes no damned sense, as critics and political opponents will point out again and again in the coming years. If Afghanistan constitutes a “vital national interest”, then the US cannot afford to walk away from the country until all tranquility breaks out.

In fact Obama later went on to box himself in even more decisively:

I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.

This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al-Qaeda can operate with impunity.

We must keep the pressure on al-Qaeda.

[…]

To abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

If al Qaeda remains permanently wedded to a base of terrorist operations in Afghanistan directed at the US, as Obama asserts, then what possible justification is there for setting a withdrawal date in 2011? Or for talking about any manner of withdrawal as long as “pressure” is needed on al Qaeda? Why “abandon” Afghanistan starting in 2011 when it’s “an unacceptable risk” now?

Obama’s attempt to justify the inherent contradictions of his position doesn’t come close to addressing our supposedly vital stake in Afghanistan or the dangerousness of al Qaeda. What he says is simply that the cost of an open-ended commitment is too great to bear, and besides a timetable for withdrawal is needed to force the Afghan government to take responsibility for its own security. All that tells us is that the American government has little to work with in Afghanistan, a country that by the way is vital to our national security.

Obama’s pronouncements that the US has “vital” interests in Afghanistan imply that we’re never pulling out. He may or may not fully realize that.

Palin doesn't speak for Palin

It seems that nobody ever speaks officially for the McCain-Palin ticket. In July, trying to distance himself from statements by Phil Gramm, his campaign co-chair and surrogate ("mental recession", "nation of whiners"), John McCain declared that Gramm ""does not speak for me — I speak for me." But only two weeks later, McCain's top economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin stated that John McCain does not necessarily speak for John McCain either.

[Holtz-Eakin] also disputes the way the [Tax Policy Center] study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. "This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree," Holtz-Eakin said. "He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls" that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.

Today McCain announced that Sarah Palin does not necessarily speak for Sarah Palin. It seems to me the only plausible conclusion is that nobody at all speaks for the Republican ticket – unless it's just a question of nobody ever being held accountable for anything they say.

Here was McCain speaking on ABC this morning:

MCCAIN: ... this business of, in all due respect, people going around and -- with sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that’s -- that’s a person’s position, this is a free country, but I don’t think most Americans think that that’s a definitive policy statement made by Governor Palin.

On Saturday Palin said in Philadelphia that she supports cross-border raids from Afghanistan into Pakistan:

Palin’s apparent disagreement with McCain’s position on Pakistan came as the Alaska governor was picking up a couple of cheesesteaks at Tony Luke’s in South Philadelphia. She was approached by a man wearing a Temple University t-shirt, who later identified himself as Michael Rovito.

[...]

“So we do cross-border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan, you think?” Rovito asked.

“If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should,” Palin said.

That sounds like a very "definitive policy statement". McCain says otherwise – apparently because Palin spoke off the cuff, or perhaps just because, as he commented, "she was in a conversation with some young man that -- or whoever it was". Excuses don't come more brazen than that. But in any event, Palin earlier endorsed cross-border attacks in a carefully controlled interview with Charles Gibson:

GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

[...]

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

The problem for McCain is that Palin is stepping on one of his favorite attack lines against Obama, who (wisely or not) several times has said he might order such cross-border raids if necessary to kill al-Qaeda leaders.

During Friday night's presidential debate in Mississippi, Obama took a similar stance and condemned the Bush administration for failing to act on the possibility terrorists are in Pakistan.

"Nobody talked about attacking Pakistan," Obama said after McCain accused the Illinois senator of wanting to announce an invasion. "If the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out."

In the very few formal interviews she has given, Palin has made a habit of taking positions closer to Obama's than McCain's or otherwise trampling on McCain's lines of attack against the Democrats. For example, she offered the opinion on Fox News that politicians with lobbyist connections to Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac have even more to explain than those who'd merely accepted campaign contributions from their executives.

On if there should be an investigation on relationships between political donations from Fannie and Freddie Mac and the bankruptcy and its impact on the economy:

"I think that’s significant, but even more significant is the role that the lobbyists play in an issue like this also. And in that cronyism — it’s symptomatic of the grade of problem that we see right now in Washington and that is just that acceptance of the status quo, the politics as usual, the cronyism that has been allowed to be accepted and then it leads us to a position like we are today with so much collapse on Wall Street."

It didn't help matters that when Palin made that comment McCain was (a) trying to embarrass Obama over such campaign donations, and (b) simultaneously trying to conceal the extent of his own campaign manager Rick Davis' record of lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac.

Now in a Philly cheese steak emporium we see Palin once again ruining one of McCain's talking points. And he can't have failed to notice that it's one of the very few times she's responded to questions directly from voters. No wonder Palin's been under wraps since the day she joined the Republican ticket. She's not only profoundly ignorant about domestic and foreign policy issues, she's also a one-woman wrecking crew of campaign tactics. Rick Davis was telling the truth, for once, when he said that Palin is "not scared to answer questions." It's the McCain campaign that's scared for her to be answering questions.

crossposted at unbossed.com