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Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis went to Brussels last week to convince NATO allies to send around 3,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where they will likely join between 3,000 and 5,000 more American troops expected to be sent there (thats in addition to the more than 8,500 US and 5,000 other NATO troops already in country).

The number of U.S. troops isnt official yet and probably wont be until mid-July, but according to a White House leak last month, that number is 4,000. The mission will be basically the same, to train, advise, and assist Afghan forces, but the intention will be to break what General John Nicholson, current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has called a stalemate.

We are not winning in Afghanistan Secretary Mattis said in June, and we will correct this as soon as possible.

You might be forgiven for feeling some dj vu. You might also be forgiven for being surprised to hear that were still in Afghanistan. And youd most definitely be forgiven for wondering why.

The reasons that the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan almost 16 years agoto hunt down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagonno longer hold. Special Forces assassins killed Osama bin Laden six years ago in his house in Pakistan. Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and while according to some accounts the organization maintains a presence in Afghanistan, its probably only there because we are, much like the cadres of ISIS-affiliated terrorists who are said to be behind a recent series of attacks in Kabul. U.S. soldiers in Islamic countries tend to draw jihadists like honey draws flies.

The Talibanconsistently the biggest problem for U.S. forces in Afghanistanare indistinguishable from the Afghan people, because they are the Afghan people, and despite years of counter-insurgency rhetoric, the likelihood of a foreign invader forcing the Afghan people to stop shooting at them is pretty close to zero. The Afghan people have a long and honorable tradition of killing foreign invaders, and were not likely to change that. The fact is, there has been no clearly articulated national security interest justifying U.S. military forces remaining in Afghanistan. Yet there they are. And now were sending more.

The sense of dj vu around this new promise to win Afghanistan is captured well by David Michds recent film, War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Glen McMahon, a thinly-veiled fictionalization of General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan whose career famously flamed out after he and his staff were caught trashing the Obama administration by Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.

McChrystal, like General David Petraeus, who replaced him in Afghanistan, and General Mad Dog Mattisnow Secretary of Defensewas worshipped by the media as a warrior scholar, a Jedi Knight, and a warrior monk, who perfectly embodied the repressed desire establishment liberals seem to have for a hard-bodied daddy to tell them what to think and who to kill. He was brought in to take over the American mission in Afghanistan in 2009 because we werent winning, and the Obama administration needed somebody to change that.

As Hastings recounts in his book The Operators, which War Machine is drawn from and based on, McChrystal was more than happy to fill that role. McChrystal was a West Point graduate whod made his career in the Armys insular, hyper-competitive, swaggering special operations community, and made his mark as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command during the bloodiest years of the war in Iraq. His greatest public coup was hunting down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq; his biggest public scandals came from his overseeing torture at Camp Nama in Iraq, and his signing off on a factitious Silver Star award for Pat Tillman which omitted the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire.

Scandals like that should have sunk McChrystal, but in the early days of the Obama transition, holding people accountable for torture or outright lies was seen as partisan and unproductive. The president believed we needed to look forward as opposed to looking backwards, and when he looked forward in Afghanistan, he saw McChrystal as someone who could win. Like General Mattis, whose call sign in Iraq was Chaos, McChrystal was believed to have the discipline, wisdom, and drive a new president needed. We seem to think, post-9/11, that our generals can save us. That sense of dj vu you might be having is the haunting reminder that they never do.

Afghanistan is symbolic of bigger problems in U.S. foreign policy, and Michds War Machine embodies some of the key problems of Afghanistan. Like the war in Afghanistan, the film cant decide what genre it belongs to. It swings from slapstick to combat film to tragedy to political satire to drama, then back again, in much the same way as the story weve been told about the war in Afghanistan. Are we there to bring democracy to the Afghans? Are we there to hunt terrorists? Are we there for womens rights? Are we trying to win, or just trying to get out? Weve turned a corner so many times we dont even know which way were going.

Another way that War Machine embodies the problem of Afghanistan is in its confusions about who were supposed to sympathize with. From his first scene, Brad Pitt plays McMahon as a blustering fool; obviouslyhesnot our protagonist. Nor are any of McMahons cronies very sympathetic, not even Anthony Michael Halls choleric General Pulver (a caricature of General Michael Flynn, who served on McChrystals staff). Ben Kingsleys Hamid Karzai is a one-note joke, andAymen HamdouchisBadi Basim, McMahons Afghan aide, has little to do besides act, you know, Afghany. The voice-over which begins the film is revealed about an hour too late to belong to Scoot McNarys reporter Sean Cullen, the films version of Michael Hastings, which suggestshemight be our hero, or at least a surrogate who can help us make sense of the story, but Cullen disappears off-stage almost as soon as he arrives, and were dumped into a firefight sequence which seeks to enlist our sympathies for both the American marines fighting in Helmandandthe Afghan villagers whose lives are made hell by those same marines. Yet more confounding, when Cullens Rolling Stone story costs McMahon his career, the film seems to want us to sympathize with the general.

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Its the same with Afghanistan. Whos really to blame, and whos the victim of circumstance? Everyone thinks theyre doing the right thing, but no one is innocent, not the hunter-killer teams, not the killer general, not the Talibans killers, not even theRolling Stonejournalist looking for the killer detail.

People have lots of feels for the soldiers, of course, and the poor Afghans, but those feelings are mostly pity, and largely abstract. Does anyone reallycareabout Afghanistan? Does anyone without a professional or personal connection to the war in Afghanistan give a rat's ass what's happening there, or bother themselves about the fact that it's been going on for almost 16 years? I have a hard time believing it. The problem of how to get American viewers invested in a complex story about Afghanistan is less a problem of narrative than a problem with how we think about the war itselfwhich is mostly not at all.

Finally, theres General McMahon. Brad Pitt plays the general with out-sized, lip-chomping brio, but the performance never quite gels. Part of the problem might be that Pitt is too introspective an actor to pull off the kind of bull-headedness that the U.S military inculcates in its officer class.

But the problem is deeper: no matterhowoutrageously Pitt and Michd played up McMahon and his war, theyd never be able to give us a caricature that could match the brutal arrogance of American military leadership, especially self-styled Caesars like McChrystal, Petraeus, and Mattis, or make a movie as FUBAR as the real war in Afghanistan. Its impossible to satirize the absurd.

Why are we still in Afghanistan? Why are we sending more troops there? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg. The ongoing U.S. mission in Afghanistan doesnt make any sense, or at least none that officials are willing to articulate, but the sad fact is just how widespread this is, and how used to it weve become.

American foreign policy stopped making sense 16 years ago, when we turned the hunt for a group of criminals into a global war without end, and it grew even more absurd when we launched an aggressive war against a sovereign nation on a pretext of lies. The chaos of American foreign policy today under Donald Trump is no more than the consequence and continuation of the last 16 yearsFor they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. What really doesnt make any sense is why we keep letting it happen.

More:
Why Afghanistan? Why Now? - Daily Beast

The window during which President Donald Trump can extricate U.S. forces from the mess in Afghanistan and blame his predecessors for the calamity is rapidly closing. A few more weeks, another surge, and he will be the third president to be saddled with this war; it will become his. The move to allow the military to determine how many more troops to send to Afghanistan would have been a wise onelet the professionals make such tactical decisionsif it reflected the presidents decision to stay the course. Such a decision would follow a review of the war involving not just the Pentagon, but also the intelligence community, the State Department and the staff of the National Security Council, among others. However, that is not the way this president makes decisions. He just left it to the Pentagon to sort out.

The Pentagon has its own agenda. It does not want to admit to having lost another war. It cannot wash its hands of what is happening in Afghanistan and blame its predecessors the way Trump can. At the same time, the Pentagon knows damn well that even when there were twenty times as many troops in Afghanistan as there are now, we did not win the war. The Pentagon seems set on just limping along, which seems better than admitting defeat. No wonder none of the generals refers to winning the war in Afghanistan; they use phrases such as, creating stability (Gen. Allen) and a V-Day for the War in Afghanistan may never be marked on a calendar. Retired Gen. David Petraeus expects us to fight in Afghanistanfor generations, adding we have been in Korea for 65-plus years

Whatever drives the Pentagon to hold the course in Afghanistan, the reasons given for the surge do not pass the smile test. To argue that the Afghan forces need more training and advice after sixteen years raises the obvious question: why would one more year make a difference? Gen. Petraeus argues that the United States should continue its mission in Afghanistan to ensure that [it] is not once again a sanctuary for al-Qaida or other transnational extremists, the way it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there. The argument that if we do not fight them there, we will have to fight them here is so threadbare it hardly conceals the hollowness of the argument.

First of all, the Taliban (which we organized and armed to fight the USSR) are not a transnational terrorist but a local insurgency. The terrorists who attacked the U.S. homeland in 2001 were not Taliban but Al Qaeda. True, the Taliban hosted them, but they were, for the most part, Saudis whom the Afghans considered foreigners. They did treat them as guests, in line with the very high value the Afghans put on hospitality. The Taliban paid a very heavy price for this mistake. There is no reason in the world to expect that they would seek to repeat it. They are fighting the United States because they want to run their country, not ours.

The notion that U.S. disengagement would turn Afghanistan back into a training base for terrorists also disregards the fact that most recent terrorist attacks in the West have been carried out by locals using makeshift weapons, like cars and knifes, trained (if at all) on the Internet. The suggested surge will do nothing to stop them. Also, now that ISIS has bases in at least half a dozen countries, if we are to deal with terrorists by occupying countries in which they may be trainedthe United States shall need to occupy and stay in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, parts of Nigeria and Mali, among other places. And the Talibans main training takes place in Pakistan, which we have not found a way to compel to help us stop the insurgency.

Last but not least, to repeat an often cited but still wise line, we need to be sure we do not create more terrorists than we kill. The civilian casualties that the war against terrorism causes is a major recruitment tool for those who seek to harm the United States.

In Afghanistan, we can safely let the Afghan people sort out their own fate. There and in other nations, the United States needs to work with moderate Muslims to counter the violent ones. Most of the job to protect us from terrorists will have to fall to the Department of Homeland Security, local police, vigilant citizens, and to mental health professionals and those who promote civility instead of hate. The Pentagon may find some consolation in the observation that the military is not losing the war in Afghanistanmerely the nation-building drive that followed a solid win in 2003 and the elimination of most Al Qaeda in the years that followed.

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He is the author of Avoiding War with China, published by University of Virginia Press.

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Time to Say Goodbye to Afghanistan | The National Interest - The National Interest Online

Editors note: Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe as well as the Middle East. He was Chief of the counterterrorism staff and executive assistant to the CIAs deputy director.

Estimates coming out of the Pentagon indicate the likelihood of an additional commitment of several thousand troops to Afghanistan. Before we make any moves in Afghanistan, it is important to look critically at the past and at our motivation for what to do now and in the future.

We got to Afghanistan based on two realities. The immediate catalyst was 9/11. Second, we saw it as a key element in our oil interests in the region a way to get our foot in the door. The outgrowth of that was our fabricated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, which morphed into our current array of difficult dilemmas in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

In short, that momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand, and which was so incredibly complicated that it flummoxed one U.S. administration after another.

So, what do we want or expect from our continued military involvement in Afghanistan and the Middle East? Apparently, we would like to see a stable region under democratic rule. We never hear U.S. officials talking about self-determination, only about regime change and democracy.

In fact, it makes no ultimate difference what the U.S. wants for Afghanistan and the Middle East. It only matters what they want for themselves, and as long as we are pushing values and ideas that are alien to them, we will never see the end of chaos.

Afghanistans geographic location has made it an important cog in the Middle East. It has been fought over and occupied for millennia by big powers seeking regional hegemony. That has relatively recently included England, Russia and the U.S., none of which has succeeded in changing the country or the minds of its peoples. Over many centuries, those and other struggles have caused hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths and significant resentment.

That momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand.

Given recent developments in the world, oil no longer plays the role that it did 25 years ago. That alters one of our reasons for remaining militarily engagement in the region.

Terrorism is our other worry. We were hard hit on 9/11, but that sort of operation against us seems to be far better controlled now than it was in 2001. The fact is that the nature of terrorism has changed. It no longer requires hideaways in the mountains or deserts of the Middle East where terrorists can be given rigorous military training. Terrorism today involves self-motivated, highly-disaffected individuals who volunteer to ISIS or any other terrorist organization to carry out suicide attacks. They work with automatic weapons and murderous vehicles. Even bombs are within their reach, and recent operations have shown that those weapons can be developed undetected in apartments in major western cities.

Terrorists have no need for bases like those previously operated in the Middle East. All they need are volunteers and central direction and that can be found, as is now the case, in countries that are not in the reach of US troops assigned to Afghanistan or the Middle East, making them no longer critical to our counterterrorism needs.

What, therefore, could possibly motivate US policy makers to continue and even augment a decades-long war that is today virtually irrelevant to the realities and motivations that got us there in the first place? It would seem that the only rationale that stems logically from that is that we are interested in regime change and the subsequent maintenance of a democracy imposed on them by us. And yet, we know that doesnt work.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that Middle Eastern nations have values that differ from ours. In doing that, we would also have to acknowledge that there are major, conflicting differences between some of the states in that region and that to leave them to the resolution of their own conflicts would likely be a violent process.

Yet, the only real peace and stability that can ultimately exist in the region is that engineered by the people involved. Perhaps we should give them the opportunity to work that out in the absence of on-site U.S. military power while limiting ourselves to diplomatic, political and economic involvements.

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Haviland Smith: On sending additional troops to Afghanistan - vtdigger.org

Iran is accusing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of "a brazen interventionist plan" to change the current government that violates international law and the U.N. Charter.

Iran's U.N. Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres circulated Tuesday that Tillerson's comments are also "a flagrant violation" of the 1981 Algiers Accords in which the United States pledged "not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs."

Tillerson said in a June 14 hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the 2018 State Department budget that U.S. policy is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons "and work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government."

"Those elements are there, certainly as we know," he said.

Kohshroo said Iran expects all countries to condemn "such grotesque policy statements and advise the government of the United States to act responsibly and to adhere to the principles of the (U.N.) Charter and international law."

He noted that Tillerson's comments came weeks after President Hassan Rouhani's re-election to another four-year term and local elections in which 71 percent of the Iranian people participated. Rouhani is a political moderate who defeated a hardline opponent.

"The people of Iran have repeatedly proven that they are the ones to decide their own destiny and thus attempts by the United States to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs will be doomed to failure," Kohshroo said. "They have learned how to stand strong and independent, as demonstrated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979."

He said Tillerson's statement also coincided with the released of newly declassified documents that "further clarified how United States agencies were behind the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular and democratically elected prime minister of Iran on Aug. 19, 1953."

At the June 14 hearing, Tillerson said the Trump administration's Iranian policy is under development.

"But I would tell you that we certainly recognize Iran's continued destabilizing (role) in the region," Tillerson said, citing its payment of foreign fighters, support for Hezbollah extremists, and "their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen."

U.S. lawmakers have long sought to hit Iran with more sanctions in order to check its ballistic missile program and rebuke Tehran's continued support for terrorist groups, and on June 15 the Senate approved a sweeping sanctions bill..

The bill imposes mandatory sanctions on people involved in Iran's ballistic missile program and anyone who does business with them. The measure also would apply terrorism sanctions to the country's Revolutionary Guards and enforce an arms embargo. It now goes to the House.

Senators insisted the new Iran sanctions won't undermine or impede enforcement of the landmark nuclear deal that former president Barack Obama and five other key nations reached with Tehran two years ago.

Read the rest here:
Iran accuses to US of 'brazen plan' to change its government ...

Under the terms of the deal, Total will invest $1 billion in the first phase of development of part of the South Pars gas field. It will form a partnership with the China National Petroleum Corporation and the Iranian company Petropars.

This is the one that everyone has been waiting for, Homayoun Falakshahi, an analyst at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said of the announcement. This deal very much sets the example.

Mr. Pouyann, a burly former rugby player, seems to have taken a calculated gamble. Iran has vast energy resources the worlds largest proven natural gas reserves and the second-largest trove of oil in the Persian Gulf, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Total is extremely familiar with the slice of South Pars that it will work on, having scoped it out before sanctions made work in Iran impossible for big international companies.

Iranian oil officials are known as tough negotiators, but Mr. Pouyann argues that by being the first of the big international oil companies to sign a major deal with a post-sanctions Iran, he was able to shape much better terms than had been offered in the past.

Being in the lead could also position Total to reap other rewards, possibly including access to the Azadegan oil field, which could become one of the industrys largest projects in the next decade.

Turbulence in the Middle East including tensions between Qatar and other gulf countries, as well as violence in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere has made some companies wary. But Mr. Pouyann sees a strong opportunity for investment.

What the Middle East can offer us is having giant resources at a low cost, he said. You can have a profitable business.

Iran, long on oil and gas, but short on capital and technology, could be the next great energy frontier if global and domestic politics permit. A wide range of international oil companies are circling around it, looking for the right opportunity.

Totals deal is not without risks, however. In particular, the Trump administration, which is reviewing its approach to Iran, could take a harder line against Tehran, discouraging even international companies from investing there.

While Mr. Pouyann cannot rule out new sanctions, he and other potential investors were pleased when the Trump administration reapproved waivers, originally signed by the Obama administration, exempting international companies that invest in Iran from certain United States sanctions.

From Totals point of view, the advantages seem to outweigh the drawbacks.

It is a fairly reasonable risk to take, given what they have been seeing and what they have been hearing, said Richard Nephew, a former sanctions coordinator at the State Department who is now a researcher at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

Total can count on the backing of the French government, and it has additional protection from the investment of China National Petroleum Corporation, a state-owned company.

And with an annual investment budget of around $17 billion, the $1 billion Total has committed to spend over several years in Iran is relatively small in the grand scheme of things, said Oswald Clint, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research in London.

Pulling off a successful project in Iran will not be easy, and doing business there comes with a broad range of difficulties. Total has spent months preparing for this moment, sending small amounts of euros to Iran, for instance, to test the banking system there. The company has identified small European banks that will furnish its local financing needs, but other companies say that financing large deals remains difficult because most lenders avoid Iran, for fear of running afoul of the United States.

Iran can also be a difficult and opaque place to do business, one where corruption is widespread and where political opposition to foreign investment in Irans natural resources can raise obstacles.

Companies also say they need to take extreme care because of sanctions. Some oil executives said that when traveling to Iran to meet with officials there, for instance, they take only laptops stripped of sophisticated software like encryption programs, and older models of mobile phones, to avoid accidentally violating export controls.

Link:
Total Signs Deal With Iran, Exposing It to Big Risks and Rewards - New York Times