Another bombing in Afghanistan has lead to civilian deaths.

Western air strikes sparked fresh controversy in Afghanistan on Wednesday as NATO said a bombing killed eight civilians and the US military estimated that up to 30 villagers died in an attack this month.

NATO soldiers on patrol in the southern province of Helmand on Tuesday came under attack from about 25 insurgents, the alliance’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

“Finding it difficult to extract themselves from this dangerous situation, ISAF troops resorted to calling for close air support,” it said. A plane dropped a bomb. “Tragically, it is believed that eight civilians were killed as a result of the air strike,” it said.

ISAF accused the attackers of sheltering among the civilian population.
The soldiers “were not aware that the insurgents were once again using civilians as human shields,” the statement said. “If this information had been known by ISAF troops, no ordnance would have been used.”

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has been in progress for many years nows and it is not clear when it will end, partially because it is not clear what the end goals is. The initial invasion was to overthrow the Taliban Government which was providing refuge for Al-Qaida. Since then there doesn’t appear to be clarity over the aims of the war. Is it to ensure Afghanistan women can attend schools? To create a functioning liberal democracy in Afghanistan? To eradicate poppy growing?

It is sometimes difficult to evaluate actions in Afghanistan because all the battles seem to be against the ‘Taliban’, yet one gets the sense that the term Taliban is used to describe any forces fighting western troops, even when they are simply Pashtun fighters opposing forces invading their homeland.

The border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to millions of ethnic Pashtun who have traditional fought any foreign forces invading their homeland, whether they be British, Soviet or US forces. What is the war aim regarding the Pashtun tribes? Can they be subdued by force? If the desire is to bring them around to a more pro-western, or at least neutral position, then using force seems to be the wrong way of going about it.

It is this lack of clarity that makes assessing the war in Afghanistan so difficult. However, Graham Fuller, a former CIA chief in Kabul has written evaluated the situation with admirable clarity in an article for the Huffington Post. His main points are:

– Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

– The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

– It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

– India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan — in the intelligence, economic and political arenas — that chills Islamabad.

– Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

– Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

– The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

– The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

– The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

– Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

From this it is not clear that there is an easy way forward with Afghanistan. All these aspects of the situation mean that it may not be possible to impose a liberal democracy in Afghanistan.

However the one tool the US does have is a powerful military, and they are using that in Afghanistan. But that does not mean it is the right tool. The way forward should be to recognise the cultural and political situation in Afghanistan and realise that we will not create a democracy by bombing villages. We must accept more limited aims, work work with the local culture, not against it, and find a way forward that involves more humanitarian work and less bombing of civilians.

Interesting post at The Wonk Room :

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.” [...]”

I suppose it’s fitting, if disturbingly ironic, that techniques adopted wholesale from methods intended to extract false confessions were used in an attempt to generate evidence of a non-existent Al Qaeda-Saddam operational relationship.

It was in many respects also a self fulfilling process. The encouragement of torture to get evidence of terrorist links to Iraq created a torture culture in parts of the US military/intelligence complex. This lead to the Abu Ghraib scandals. In reading about the war in Iraq it is clear that at least some of the insurgency were motivated by these and other travesties inflicted by the US military.The ultimate effect of using torture to ‘prove’ terrorism in Iraq lead to terrorism in Iraq.

The news today reported on the rescue of an American merchant seaman who was being held by Somali pirates (see for example, this Washington Post article).

The interesting dimension in the Somali pirate story is that it is still occurring at this time after so many resources have been directed to the issue. Somali pirates have been operating of the coast of Somalia for some time, this is a prime location as there is a large traffic of cargo ships travelling past Somalia as they exit from the Suez Channel and relating ports around the Gulf.

Countries from around the world, developed and developing, have sent naval ships to the ocean off of Somali to counter the pirates, and while we will see occasional stories of triumph overall this naval surge does not appear to be that successful. It is not difficult to see why. The sea area around Somalia is vast, dotted with merchant ships travelling too and fro and also seething with Somali fishing vessels, some of which may contain pirates.

Arrayed against this are relatively few large industrial strength warships, primarily designed for high-intensity modern naval warfare. Some are armed with enough cruise missiles to level a Somali town, but perfectly useless for catching pirates.

And it has always been this way. When the United States had problems with Barbary pirates from North Africa capturing United States ships in the Mediterranean at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries they launched two wars against the Barbary nations, landing and fighting in Tripoli and other North African ports (1801-1815).

The way to defeat pirates is to remove the safe havens they have on land, not to try and intercept them in the endless oceans.

The implications of this however, for the Somali situation are too terrible for many to contemplate. Somalia is a “failed state”, and one in which the United States intervened for humanitarian reasons, only to have the soldiers killed by warlords in desperate gun battles in the narrow streets of Mogidishu (see Black Hawk Down). Bill Clinton rapidly removed the American forces, and I doubt any President is likely to wish to go down that road again.

With the most effective response closed off, it will be interesting to see how affected nations adapt to the Somali pirate threat and if their military forces, and in particular their navies, are able to come up with a strategy the uses all their high-tech equipment to defeat a low tech opponent for which the were never designed to.

Robert Farley a while back wrote an interesting article titled “Abolish the Air Force“, making the case that the Air Force as a distinct military structure should be abolished. This is an intriguing idea.

But it raises in my mind a more basic question – why is their an airforce in the first place?

If you think of the history of warfare, there have been two major warfighting services – the Navy and the Army. These have been enduring institutions for centuries.

When new mechanisms for fighting wars were introduced they were integrated into these structures. So for example, when fighting soldiers became an important part of naval strategy, a new force – the marines – was integrated into the navy, and when aircraft carriers became a potent weapon – the fleet air arm – was created, again as part of the navy.

Similarly new land warfighting technology created new forces in the army, Artillery and Armour being prime examples.

When air fighting came of age during World War 1 the air arm were part of the other services, such as the Army Royal Flying Corp, but after the war the UK created a new service the Royal Air Force:

The decision to merge the two units and create an independent air force was a response to the events of World War I, the first war in which air power proved to be decisive. (ref: wikipedia)

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