Photograph courtesy of the Jamestown Foundation

The Jamestown Foundation is reporting that the Taliban spring offensive will target the interdiction of NATO supply lines: “There are indications that a main target of the offensive will be the Afghanistan/Pakistan frontier, in particular the strategically vital Khyber Pass.”

Thaindian News is reporting the same thing.  Of course, the Jamestown Foundation released their report on April 3, 2008, and Thaindian News released their report on April 2, 2008.  The Captain’s Journal released our report, Taliban and al Qaeda Strategy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, on March 23, 2008, more than a week before any other analyst.

We’re glad to serve you with the best and most timely intelligence and military analysis.

The Israel-Arab Reader, edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (of GLORIA Center and MERIA).  This updated 626 page tome goes through more than one hundred years of history in the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Detailed, scholarly, and involved – but readable.  It should be a volume in your library.

Our friend Matt at Blackfive has posted some great video from SOF in Sadr City.  It’s well worth the time to view it.  Anyone who has spent even a few minutes at The Captain’s Journal knows full well what we think of Sadr and the political reluctance on the part of both the Iraqi and U.S. administrations to take him on and cut his forces’ ties with Iran.  Force must be projected into his camp, and this is a good start.

In the spirit of providing good video for the weekend, see first clearing operations by the Marines late in 2004 from Fallujah.  This video shows full well the stress and decision-making that goes on in room clearing while insurgents are shouting Allah akbar.  Warning: graphic language and content.

Next, from more recently in Fallujah (2007), see the Marines take on insurgents in a nighttime fight.  Much of the U.S. fire is coming from the rooftop of the house.Matt posted some great video, but the SOF aren’t the first ones to engage in heavy kinetic operations.  Nonetheless, we wish the SOF well in Sadr city.

In Our Deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam we discussed the mid-level commander Taliban defector who first promised fighters against the Taliban and then holed himself up in a room and screamed for help from the British and U.S. when the battle for Musa Qala started.  The whole “talk with the moderates” thing didn’t work out very well.

 But this tactic will not go away, it seems.  There are recent reports that talks are still ongoing.

The country’s most powerful opposition group announced last week that they have been engaging in peace talks with the Taliban. The move signals both the growing divisions within the Afghan government and the increasing possibility that elements of the insurgent group could be drawn into the political process, say analysts.

If successful, officials argue that the talks will change the way the United States deals with Afghanistan, by forcing Washington to contend with the opposition.

Representatives of the United National Front – an assemblage of ministers, members of parliament, and warlords led by former Northern Alliance commanders – say they have held secret talks with the Taliban for at least five months.

“Leaders of some Taliban sections contacted us,” says Front spokesman Sayyid Agha Hussein Fazel Sancharaki, “saying, ‘We are both Muslims, we are both Afghans, and we are both not satisfied with the government’s performance.’ ”

The government, which has had a series of secret talks with the “moderate Taliban” since 2003, has in contrast taken a different approach to negotiations. It insists that the Taliban must first surrender completely – disavow armed insurrection and accept the foreign presence.

Of course, the Taliban will not surrender their weapons and stand down.  The idea of talks has been pursued recently by local Afghanis to no avail.

“At first, we negotiate. Otherwise the fight is the only way we can solve the problem. It’s the second best way,” Haji Hashem, chairman of Zabul provincial council, told Canwest News in an exclusive interview from the capital of remote and impoverished Zabul province that borders Pakistan.

“I don’t like to hear about death,” Mr. Hashem said. “Sometimes NATO has to fight.”

Mr. Hashem’s comments came after a weekend in which a major offensive by coalition and Afghan forces left several dozen Taliban fighters dead in neighbouring Uruzgan province. Here in Zabul, nestled between Canada’s base in Kandahar province and the border with Pakistan, the local Afghan police also killed four Taliban insurgents on the weekend.

“If they stand against the government, we should get rid of them,” Mr. Hashem said. “I am hopeful we will have good police.”

Zabul ranks a close fourth behind Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan as the most violent of Afghanistan’s southern provinces. But its proximity to the Pakistan border, where al-Qaeda and Taliban militants regroup and re-energize to launch attacks in the south on coalition troops, poses an additional security threat.

As he sipped tea, Mr. Hashem recalled for the first time the clandestine negotiations that took place in December.

Elders and local politicians here tell of repeated abductions, especially of schoolteachers and local mullahs, threats, intimidation and mutilation of local people. All of this has continued in a desperately poor, illiterate region that has traditionally relied on opium farming.

So Mr. Hashem said local elders felt they had little to lose by reaching out to the Taliban. “We had a jirga of peace and security and it was the decision of the jirga to talk to those guys.”

But they did not tell U.S. authorities, which have jurisdiction over this region and have pumped more than $140-million in aid into the province. Nor did they tell their own government. “We just brought the result (of the negotiation) to the governor,” Mr. Hashem said.

They arranged a meeting in Sharizifat, a remote rural region.

“We asked them, don’t burn our schools, don’t bother those doing construction, don’t torture or kill,” he recalled.

But the message that came back from the four Taliban commanders sent to talk was firm.

“We got orders from Pakistan. We got orders to burn reconstruction projects,” he recalled.

Talks with the Taliban will not redound to any good for Afghanistan or the counterinsurgency campaign.  When pondering strategy and counterinsurgency doctrine, it is best to give up believing in myths and face reality.

Prior: Talking with the Enemy

Preliminary Reading:

Calamity in Basra and British Rules of Engagement
The Rise of the JAM
The Battle in Basra
Continued Chaos in Basra
Flushing out the British Narrative
The Basra Backfire

The Long War Journal is discussing the idea that the Iraqi Army is following in the footsteps of the U.S. Army in dividing the Mahdi militia into legitimate actors and criminals.  We respectfully disagree.  Both Badr and the Mahdi militia have taken weapons and received training from Iran, and also serve Iranian intentions of undermining stability in Iraq, notwithstanding the show of political legitimacy by Badr.  The SIIC and Sadrists will not become a legitimate part of Iraq until force is projected into their camp and ties with Iran are cut.  We continue to believe that Operation Cavalry Charge has adequate forces and that the root problem is a lack of political will on the part of both Maliki and the Iraqi Army.  Recent reports justify this narrative.

On the eve of the Iraqi government’s showdown last week with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, Ismail Shnawa’s commander ordered him not to fight.

“He told us not to shoot back even if we get shot at by the Mahdi Army,” said Shnawa, a soldier in Iraq’s paramilitary police force that is commanded by the Iraqi army.

The six-day showdown with al-Sadr and other Shiite militias was the toughest test for Iraqi government forces since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The week of violence exposed troubling signs that the country’s security forces have much work before they can take over for U.S. troops. Militias and their followers remain entrenched within the government forces, and units sympathetic to al-Sadr, such as Shnawa’s, refused to fight.

In the southern town of Basra, more than 400 Iraqi soldiers and officers handed their weapons to the enemy, Ministry of Interior spokesman Abdel Karim Khalaf said.

In Baghdad, at least 65 Iraqi soldiers and policemen switched loyalties, said Baghdad’s deputy mayor, Naeem al-Kaabi, a Sadrist leader. Many others either wouldn’t fight or willingly surrendered, including Shnawa and 50 others in his unit …

“The Sadrists control more areas in Basra than when the fighting began,” said Osama al-Nujaif, a secular Sunni lawmaker who helped broker the cease-fire.

There are not only questions of commitment and will.  Pentagon officials are also dismayed at the apparent continuing lack of competence of the Iraqi Army.

“There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up” on their own, a senior U.S. military official in Washington said, reflecting the frustration of some at the Pentagon. He and other military officials requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record.

Four military officials said Tuesday that the Americans were aware in general terms of the coming offensive but were surprised by the timing and by the Iraqis’ almost immediate need for U.S. air support and other help.

Whatever happens in Basra, any potential good will come spuriously rather than as a result of decisive action by the either the British or Iraqi Armies.  As the smoke clears in Basra, it will become even more obvious that it didn’t come from battle.  The smoke helped to hide the more ugly facts of the operation, like targeting the Sadrists and leaving SIIC alone, defections within the police and Army, brokering of a ceasefire by the Iranians, and on the sorry story goes.

The Multinational Force is reporting that Marine Major William G. Hall, 38 of Seattle, died of wounds suffered in combat in Anbar.  He was assigned to 3rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion, Marine Air Control Group 38, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, California.  Actually, the Multinational Force appears to have his rank wrong.

Marine Lt. Col. William G. Hall, a Garfield High School and Washington State University graduate, was killed Saturday in Iraq, according to his family.

Hall, 38, who grew up in Skyway south of Seattle, is one of the highest-ranking U.S. military officers killed in the war.

Hall’s family said the husband and father of four died while riding in Fallujah in a vehicle that struck a roadside bomb. He was on his third deployment there, having arrived in February, and had been promoted to his new rank a month ago.

Hall’s wife and mother first learned in a phone call from the Marine Corps that he was in surgery after being injured. Later, two supportive Marine casualty-notification officers arrived at their door and they knew.

My heart goes out to the Hall family.  This visit by casualty-notification officers is one I awaited late at night for many sleepless nights, and thankfully didn’t get.  My thoughts frequently run to Fallujah – a place I have never been.

While Lt. Col. Hall cannot be brought back, the Marines can do something to prevent this from happening again.  Only a single IED exploded in Fallujah during the deployment of the 2/6 Marines, early in the summer of 2007.  After that … no more.

It’s time for the Marines in Anbar to make a statement in Fallujah and reinforce the idea that such things will not be tolerated.  Ever.

To read the reports of the results of the recent visit of Deputy Secretary of States John D. Negroponte to Pakistan (along with US Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher), one might be tempted to think that all was well with U.S. -Pakistani relations.  But the reception was described as cold, and many in Pakistan saw the visit not only as ham-handed pressure, but panic over the Pakistani turn away from the U.S.-led global war on terror.  In Misinterpreting the Pakistani Elections we discussed the common (and incorrect) narrative that the recent elections saw the rejection of the Islamists in Pakistan (in reality the rejection was of the old guard’s ability to govern rather than the views of the Taliban).  In Pashtun Rejection of the Global War on Terror we discussed the turn away from U.S. interests by many in Pakistan.  The blame, they say, rests with the U.S.

Some senior Pakistani military leaders say that the U.S. failure in Afghanistan has shifted the war to Pakistan.  In order to remedy the situation, tribal leaders in Pakistan want the jirga system.

Elders of the Khyber Tribal Agency on Wednesday urged the US administration to stop seeking military solution to militancy in the tribal areas and suggested adopting traditional means of Jirga to end the resistance. A group of 11 tribal elders led by Malik Darya Khan met US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher in Landikotal Cantonment. They told the US officials that the centuries-old Jirga system was still effective in the tribal territory, which provided remedy for every trouble, including the scourge of terrorism.

In other words, the tribal leaders want to negotiate.  Key Pakistani leaders have gone further, saying that we ought to review what the word terror means.  But as we have discussed in Baitullah Mehsud Ready for Talks with Pakistan, the preconditions for peace involve a complete disengagement with the U.S. war on terror.  In case this point has been missed, the Taliban have recently made it clear again.

Welcoming the offer of negotiations by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, representatives of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Bajaur — shown brandishing lethal weapons on the TV channels — have told Islamabad what it has to do if it wants no trouble from them. TTP leaders, including Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, Maulvi Sher Bahadar, Dr Muhammad Ismail, and party spokesman Maulvi Omar, said they were ready for talks with the government if Pakistan were “to give up its pro-US stance first”. (Some newspapers reported it as “sever ties with the US”.)

The TTP warriors also demanded implementation of sharia law and the jirga system for their territory “according to tribal traditions”, assuming that sharia law was not in force in the rest of Pakistan. They added, however, that “jihad against America would continue in Afghanistan”, but that they were ready “to end their activities and improve law and order in Pakistan if the government showed flexibility”. The atmosphere in the TTP gathering in Inayat Killay in Bajaur was very upbeat after feeling the winds of change blowing in Islamabad.

The situation could not be clearer.  Pakistan is turning hard left away from the long war, and the administration is right to be worried.  However, we could have told the State Department that a visit by diplomats would have no affect (the State Department ought to be reading The Captain’s Journal).  The lack of timeliness in the campaign in Afghanistan has placed this administration – and will place the next administration – in the hard position of having to take unilateral action in the NWFP and FATA of Pakistan, even in violation of Pakistani sovereignty.  Al Qaeda and the Taliban currently have almost unmitigated freedom in this area, and there is a cold wind blowing that will probably make this situation worse before it gets better.

In Bill Lind’s Iranian Nightmare, I responded to Lind’s hand wringing over what Iran might do if the U.S. escalated force against their involvement in Iraq.  It seems that William Lind didn’t get enough attention to his first cut at this, so he is publishing his commentary again with UPI as Dangers in Iraq – Part 1.  Only this time he (or the editor) cut the words “Nous sorrune dans une pot de chambre, and nous y serron emerdee” when lampooning Petraeus and Bush.

It’s interesting – what one can learn over the internet.  There’s no good translation of this phrase, and my previous response to Lind got several thousand hits from Google searches on this very phrase (I had copied most of Lind’s commentary into my response so that context would be available, and the power of Google easily found my post).  I have spoken with someone knowledgeable in French (one of my sons), and the reason this has no translation available is because it has improper verb conjugation, slang, and other oddities in the phrase (maybe there are other reasons).  No matter.  My response to Lind remains as salient as it was when first published.  And Lind is still a dolt who ought to worry about his own chamber pot.