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It is now official beyond question. The senior ranks of the U.S. military and foreign-policy leadership have now fully succumbed to the belief that all problems in the Middle East and South Asia must include, at their core, the application of lethal military power. No other alternative is considered. Worse, the military solutions they advocate have literally no chance of accomplishing the national objectives sought. The latest damning evidence: the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan testified before the Senate last week that he believes thousands of additional U.S. troops should be sent back to Afghanistan.

It is difficult to overstate the utter bankruptcy of a strategy designed to bring peace to Afghanistan based on sending large numbers of U.S. service members back into harms way. The Washington Post reported in early February that Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. said he believes the new president may be open to a more robust military effort that is objectives-based. Questioned by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R.-S.C.), the general said he can definitely carry out his mission with less than 50,000 coalition troops, but hesitated a bit when asked if he could do so with less than 30,000.

The results of sixteen years conducting counterinsurgency, foreign military training and counterterrorism operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan should argue persuasively against repeating such a strategy. The results have been utter and complete failures on the strategic level. Supporters of using COIN and CT cite the Iraq surge of 2007 as an example of how a properly run operation can succeed. Such endorsements expose a significant lack of understanding of what actually happened in 2007 and, of greater importance, that those individuals have a marked inability to see beyond tactical outcomes.

The fundamental point that must be understood is that the surge of U.S. troops into Baghdad was not the causal factor in the dramatic reduction of violence. It was a contributing factor and did play a positive role, but without question was not the decisive one. In late 2006 the Sunni insurgency was beginning to buckle under the cumulative weight of attacks by the United States, coalition forces, Shia militias and the Iraqi security forces. The pressure turned into an existential threat, however, when Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)an organization that should have been a natural Sunni allyturned against them.

As was documented in great detail in Gian Gentiles Wrong Turn, Sunni sheikhs recognized that their only chance for survival was to join with U.S. forces against their common AQI enemy. Beginning even before the surge was authorized by President Bush, Sunni sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha from Anbar Province approached U.S. soldiers and offered to join with them in ridding Ramadi of AQI. The resulting Awakening began a process that was well under way when Gen. David Petraeus arrived the next year.

To his credit, when Petraeus saw how effective the program was, he successfully expanded it to other areas of Iraq. But it cannot be overstated that Petraeuss efforts were successful primarily because other Sunni leaders saw the effectiveness of Sheikh Sattars efforts and wanted to replicate them. This point cannot be missed: the Sunnis never cooperated with U.S. forces because they believed their future lay with the Coalition, as one general famously said in 2008. They rationally saw that without a tactical union with America, they would be annihilated.

Dr. Sterling Jensen, one of the worlds leading experts on the Iraq surge, and Iraqi Gen. Najim al-Jabouri (currently commanding Iraqi forces assaulting Mosul) wrote of this period that in fact, U.S. troops in general were not seen as useful even before the surge. When announcing the Anbar Awakening, Sheikh Sattar told the Americans that as long as the U.S. brigade helped locals become card-carrying security forces and be permitted to work in their areas, the U.S. forces could stay on their bases while the Anbaris fought. No such conditions exist in Afghanistan today, nor did they in 2010 when the United States surged thirty thousand troopsand that explains why the Afghan surge did not knock out the insurgency.

Second, there remains a troubling lack of understanding at the most senior levels of U.S. government of the interaction between tactical operations and strategic outcomes. At the time of the Iraq surge, the most oft-cited justification for the operation was that the reduced level of violence provided breathing space to the Iraqi authorities to affect political reconciliation that would ultimately bring stability. But once cleared of the existential threat the insurgency posed to the Shia government, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki took advantage of the breathing space to eliminate most of his Sunni opponents. These oppressive tactics, in fact, helped facilitate the rise of ISIS three years after U.S. withdrawal from the area. Much the same scenario played out during the Afghan surge of 2010.

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How to Lose the War in Afghanistan - The National Interest Online (blog)

wbur

February 15, 2017Updated 02/15/2017 1:34 PM

The Soviet Union fought a bloody and disastrous war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Despite this, Russia is still active in the region today. In fact, Sen. John McCain said last week that Russia is propping up the Taliban to undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.

Here & Now's Meghna Chakrabarti speaks with Andrew Weiss (@andrewsweiss), vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

On the motivation behind Russia's presence in Afghanistan

"Well, I don't think we're talking so much about presence, so much as we're talking about harassment and efforts by the Russians to undermine the United States- and NATO-led military effort there. What we've seen in recent days, including this week, are the Russians trying to build a diplomatic profile on Afghanistan that basically circumvents what the U.S.-led effort is about and circumvents the government of Afghanistan itself."

"So, what they're doing is they're basically building bridges to the Taliban, the radical group which ruled Afghanistan before the U.S. military intervention in 2001. And they're trying to basically legitimize the Taliban. They seem to be doing that on the back of a false narrative, which is what Gen. Nicholson was just talking about, which claims that the Taliban are the only serious group operating against Islamic State in Afghanistan. There are other indications of Russian intelligence sharing with the Taliban, which began at least starting in 2015. There's indications of Russian cross-border military activity, and possibly some weapons being transferred from the Russian government to the Taliban. When Gen.Nicholson was testifying the other day, he said he wouldn't talk about any of those issues in open session. So, we're operating on the basis of press reports. The other thing which we're aware of is a Russian diplomatic offensive. This week there's a big conference in Moscow. They've invited various regional stakeholders, they've excluded the United States and NATO from participating in that diplomatic exchange in Moscow."

On Russian concerns about the drug trade in Afghanistan

"Well, there's no doubt that the drug trade, the flow of narcotics that are grown in Afghanistan across this very porous border into central Asia and then onward into drug markets in Russia that's clearly a problem. But I think the root of it is the United States and Russia are now acting like competing great powers, and times, adversarial great powers. So, when you see Russian planes buzzing U.S. military vessels in the Black Sea in recent days, you see the interference in our election, you see the attempts to undermine the U.S. image around the world as a bastion of democracy this I would put in the same basket. It's ankle biting, it's trying to undermine the U.S. military effort. For many years, the Russians were quite upset about the U.S. military presence on the territory of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, post-Soviet successor countries. They worked very hard to basically get us kicked out of those countries. And now that the United States is backing away from its long-term military commitment to Afghanistan, I think they're saying there's an opening here for Russian influence."

"When you see Russian planes buzzing U.S. military vessels in the Black Sea in recent days, you see the interference in our election, you see the attempts to undermine the U.S. image around the world as a bastion ofdemocracy this I would put in the same basket."

On a potential repeat of the Soviet war in Afghanistan

"I think the Russian government is unlikely, as they say in Russian, step into that river twice. But we are seeing, I think, is a revival of Cold War-style thinking. There was a great interview the other day in TASS, the Russian state news agency, with their main envoy for Afghanistan. And in this interview, Ambassador Kabulov really portrays the entire question of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in Cold War terms. He talks about how the U.S. used to have these big bases in Iran, we got kicked out of Iran after the revolution. We then seized on Afghanistan as a pivot point to project influence toward the Middle East, toward China, Pakistan and Russia. And he sort of talks about, you know, We lived through the Cold War, we know what this is all about, and there's this really larding it quite darkly in terms of being geopolitical great-gain competition. I think that kind of talk is a reflection of what policys all about, which is if they can do things to squeeze out the United States or to make the U.S. lose, that's gotta be good for Russia. I think that's a misguided way to think about a problem as complex as Afghanistan, but it clearly holds a lot of sway at senior levels in the Russian government."

On how Russian influence complicates U.S. efforts in Afghanistan

"You'd have to talk to somebody whos following Afghanistan more closely than I do to understand exactly how much the political challenge facing the U.S. and the Congress right now, particularly the Trump administration, in lobbying for a greater military role in Afghanistan is affected by the Russian issue. My sense is that's probably a second-order factor, but I'm not an expert on that issue. I think what I would focus more on is that the United States is doing things militarily, diplomatically and politically inside Afghanistan, and having this Russian role is just simply unhelpful. So it's more, I think, a question of it being eroding some of the political processes that we're trying to promote for example, there was a peace initiative that basically involved the government in Kabul making amends and trying to get a group led by one of the warlords, Hekmatyar, taken off the UN sanctions list. Basically, for mischief-making purposes, the Russians intervened and basically said, No, we're not sure that makes sense right now, and it undermined an attempt to promote reconciliation within Afghanistan. So, I'd put most of what we're seeing in the category of harassment and attempts to disrupt what the United States and the government in Kabul are doing, rather than an attempt to actually insert Russia directly back into this conflict."

On whether Russia has been successful in its attempts to harass U.S. efforts

"Yeah, no, I'm sure. As Nicholson said in his testimony last week, the war's at a stalemate. So, I think when you're in a situation like that, any effort by the Russians to basically undermine what the United States is doing is a net-negative, both for us, and I think most tragically for the people of Afghanistan."

This story aired on February 15, 2017.

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What Is Russia Doing In Afghanistan? - Here And Now

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UAE Envoy to Afghanistan Dies From Kandahar Blast Wounds Wall Street Journal (subscription) KABULThe United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Afghanistan has died in an Emirati hospital from wounds sustained in a bombing last month in the eastern Afghan city of Kandahar, Emirati state media reported Wednesday. Juma Mohammed Abdullah Al ... UAE ambassador to Afghanistan laid to restgulfnews.com UAE Mourns Death of Ambassador Injured in Afghanistan AttackAsharq Al-awsat English UAE ambassador wounded in Afghanistan bombing diesFox News The National -Dhaka Tribune -Arab News all 43 news articles »

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UAE Envoy to Afghanistan Dies From Kandahar Blast Wounds - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Written by Praveen Swami , Shaju Philip | New Delhi/kochi | Updated: February 16, 2017 10:26 am These Kerala residents, all members of an Islamic State-inspired cult, disappeared into the mountains of Afghanistans remote Nangarhar province. (Representational Photo/Reuters)

Like every other grandmother, theres just one thing Afsath Rehman wants to talk about: the children that her sons, Ejaz Kettiyapuraiyil and Shihaz Kettiyapuraiyil, have had in past few months. They promised to send me photographs but they havent so far, she sighs, echoing the complaints of a million other parents with children living in the diaspora. They said they have to travel one-and-a-half hours to reach a telephone. Thats a very long way.

Except, Afsath Rehman isnt like every other grandmother.

WATCH VIDEO |Families From Kerala Try To Build Islamic State In Afghanistans Nangarhar Province

Last year, Ejaz Kettiyapuraiyil, his wife Rahaila, then three months pregnant, and their two-year-old child, along with Shihaz Kettiyapuraiyil, and his wife Ajmala, disappeared into the mountains of Afghanistans remote Nangarhar province along with eighteen other Kerala residents, all members of an Islamic State-inspired cult led by preacher Abdul Rashid.

From interviews with family members, and messages they have sent their friends, The Indian Express has pieced together a portrait of the bizarre life the group has built for itself in the eight months since they disappeared. The members of the group have set up stores, teach religion, have married, and had children. None appears to be engaged in military activity.

The intent seems to be to set up a community that will nurture future jihadists who will arrive from Kerala and other parts of India for training, says an Indian intelligence official. This is the incubator, the nursery.

Hamsa Sagar, the Rehman familys comfortable home near Kasaragod, isnt anyones conception of a jihad incubator. Ejaz practised medicine; his younger brother was an engineer; their father, Abdul Rehman, worked hard overseas to lay solid middle-class foundations for his family, and by all accounts, had little to do with religious chauvinism. Three years ago, though, the sons discovered neo-fundamentalist religion, and began rebelling against their father, saying they wanted to live life as the Prophet had.

They rejected all this, Abdul Rehman says, this life I had made.

In Nangarhar, the life they have is hard. The region they inhabit, Indian intelligence officials believe, is remote and mountainous, unconnected by regular road links. The rest of the migrants from Kerala are also thought to be living in village homes dotted around the same area.

Ejaz said both families are living together in a small house, his mother says. There is no air conditioner or fridge or any luxury. But, they say they are living in heaven and would not come back.

In their last call home, made a month and a half ago, Ejaz told his family about the birth of the two sons, and said he was running a medical clinic contributing his skills as a doctor to the war-torn community. Shihaz, he said, was working as a teacher, also volunteering his knowledge of the sciences.

A third child has been born to the fledgling Islamic State community from Kerala. Bexin Vincent, who named himself Issa after converting to Islam, called his father K F Vincent to inform him of the news. Bexin called his mother-in-law, too, to say his wife and he were living some distance away, and that phone calls were expensive.

Though Afsath Rehman craves phone calls from her children, her husband disagrees. I dont like attending to their calls, he says bluntly. When we tell them to come back, they ask us to join them in what they tell us is the true Islamic life. They imagine they are living as every true Muslim should. Its a lecture, not a conversation.

Abdul Rehman says he believes others in Kasaragod are also in touch with his sons. When one of our family members met with an accident a few months ago, Ejaz came to know about it much before I did, he says.

Local police and intelligence officials agree. Theres a whole subterranean Islamist network thats still active in Kerala, sympathetic to the Islamic State project, says an officer familiar with the investigation into the disappearance. The next stage will likely be the recruitment of volunteers for actual military training.

That assessment may not be alarmist: al-Qaeda channels on the encrypted chat client Telegram, for example, have been producing prodigious amounts of translated propaganda material in Tamil and Malayalam for the past six months, translating the primary texts of jihadist patriarchs Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri for audiences so far unfamiliar with them.

It isnt hard to detect the communal strains that underly this development. Ashfaque Masjid, who travelled to Nangarhar with his wife, Shamsiya, and one-year-old daughter Ayesha, called his sister, Shajira Majid, some months ago. This is a land of Muslims, Shajira Majeed recalls her brother saying, and we need not see any Hindu here. He wanted all of us join him in that place. He told us he would not return.

No one is quite certain what shaped Ashfaque Majids world view. Until 2012 a commerce student at Mumbais Mithibhai College, he looked after his fathers hotel business in the city alongside.

But then, according to charges filed by the National Investigation Agency, Majid made contact with Arshi Qureshi, a manager with controversial neo-fundamentalist preacher Zakir Naik Islamic Research Foundation, who in turn put him touch with the cult in Kasaragod. Majid broke with his family business, and moved back to Kerala.

The idea that emigrating is necessary for a full practice of Islam has old roots in South Asias political history: in 1920, tens of thousands responded to calls to make hijrat, or migration, to Afghanistan, rather than live in British-ruled India. Large numbers of migrants were killed by hunger or looters; the Khyber pass, contemporary accounts record, was littered with corpses.

For the families of many of those who have gone to Afghanistan, the politics underlying their migration is incomprehensible. Mohammad Mehmood, whose son Mohammad Salil was among the migrants, has got two calls from his son, once a well-off worker in Sharjah.

When I asked him why left home, he had no answers, Mehmood says. He is living according Koran and has no plan to return. I pick up his calls, and he starts delivering religious sermons.

The shortest conversations have been between Hafeezuddin and his mother, Khadeeja. The words get stuck in my throat, she says, speaking from behind a half-closed door. I cried when he last called. He told me that we would meet in heaven.

Hes sent Telegram messages since. Sleep doesnt help when its your soul thats tired, one reads.

See more here:
In Afghanistan, families from Kerala try to build Islamic State - The Indian Express

India will be part of the six-nation talk on Afghanistan to be held in Moscow on Wednesday. The other participants will be Russia, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and Iran. This meeting will follow the 27 December meeting in Moscow which was attended (apart from the host Russia) by China and Pakistan. Notably, no representative of the Afghan government was invited then to deliberate on the future of Afghanistan.

The outcome of that meeting upset both India and Afghanistan as the three participants seemed to legitimise the role of Taliban under the cover of fighting the bigger threat of Islamic State. This was a result of some very clever manoeuvring by the Pakistani army generals who were worried about Indias growing role in Afghanistan after the formation of the US-India-Afghanistan trilateral. By projecting Islamic State to be a bigger threat than the Taliban, Pakistan has been able to convince Russia and China of the need to accommodate Taliban in the fight against the Islamic State. Involved in Syria on the side of Bashar al-Assad regime where a number of Russian origin fighters have pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State, Moscow proved to be an easy convert.

Though Iran was not a part of the 27 December meeting and it has its own set of problems with the Sunni Taliban, it has also shown flexibility to achieve the greater aim of ousting American presence and influence from the region. An interesting article by Andrew Korybko of the Sputnik News on the website of Katehon think tank argues that India will be the biggest obstacle to the peace process in Afghanistan.

Compared to Iran, which is flexible, and the Donald Trump administration, which can be sold a face-saving exit from Afghanistan, India has an unwavering and obstinate stance that all Taliban are terrorists.

The upcoming meeting in Moscow, in Korybkos view, is likely intended as a polite/diplomatic introduction to India about the changing reality in Afghanistan (out of respect to the enduring Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership) and a way to formally get Iran on board with this initiative. But one of the more interesting things Korybko does is to compare Russias role in Afghanistan to the Astana process for Syria involving Russia, Iran and Turkey.

The case that things are not going in Indias favour in Afghanistan is undeniable. An editorial in this newspaper laid out the reasoning eloquently and also the need for New Delhi to re-establish its contacts with the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan. There are five more points that can be made in light of Korybkos arguments.

One, the current situation in Afghanistan is a result of, among other things, the hasty US withdrawala decision taken by the Barack Obama administration. In this regard, the comparison with Syria is apt. Obamas halfway commitment for the opposition forces in Syria and the governing regime in Afghanistan left a vacuum which was skillfully exploited by Kabul.

Two, Trumps rhetoric on Iran is not helpful to Indias role in Afghanistan. Even if Moscow has bought into the theories sold by the Pakistani generals, Irans commitment to accommodate Taliban is not foolproof. But Trumps continued lashing of the Iran nuclear deal (signed during Obamas tenure) and inclusion of Iran in the seven Muslim majority nations selected for travel ban into the US has strengthened anti-American hardliners inside Tehran. If Trump had recognized the usefulness of the nuclear deal, India, Iran and the US could have provided robust firewall to the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul.

But this does not mean that all is won for the Moscow-led coalition. Because, and this is the third point, Russia does not enjoy the same legitimacy in Afghanistan as it does in Syria.

To start with, unlike the Astana process where Moscow invited both the Assad regime and the representatives of the Syrian rebels, the 27 December meeting began on a skewed notelegitimizing Taliban without consulting the Ghani government which itself has participated in talks with the Taliban previously under the supervision of both the US and China. And, just like the US is reviled in the Middle East for its interventions, the Soviet Union invasion of 1979 hasnt been completely forgotten in Afghanistan.

Four, the peace process led by Moscow relies on many flawed assumptions. The biggest of them is that the Islamic State in Afghanistan, or Wilayat Khorasan, is a bigger threat than the Taliban. But there are others too. As is clear from Korybkos article, the whole exercise is dependent on the ability to distinguish good Taliban from the bad. By bad Taliban, Korybko does not mean the Tehrik-i-Taliban as is understood in Pakistan from the phrase. He means the people who have joined the Islamic State. With hardly any Arab face in Wilayat Khorasan, such an exercise of separating the good from the bad will be Sisyphean in character.

The last point is the biggest reason why the Moscow-led peace process will fail miserably in buying peace. The whole peace process doesnt recognize the biggest problem: Pakistan. The reason the US has not been able to deliver peace in Afghanistan has been the same. Washington relied on Pakistan to extinguish the terrorists on which Rawalpindi depended for maintaining influence in their strategic backyard. Moscow may want to displace American role from the region but it should also learn from Americas experience to achieve that.

But who wants peace anyway? The governments in Kabul and New Delhi probably. But the roles of both are shrinking.

First Published: Wed, Feb 15 2017. 03 20 PM IST

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Why the latest peace bid in Afghanistan may fail - Livemint