Archive for the 'al Qaeda' Category

A confluence of events and articles is focusing attention on the question(s) “Why are we in Afghanistan?” and “Is it worth it?”  A main stream media reporter recently sent The Captain’s Journal a note questioning what would happen if the U.S. and Britain completely pulled out of Afghanistan?  This reporter isn’t alone.  The likes of Dr. John Nagl, Michael Yon, Bill Roggio and Dr. David Kilcullen have recently weighed in on a number of both directly and tangentially related issues concerning whether we stay in Afghanistan and what the campaign should look like if we do.  Since this also relates to our own advocacy of a particular strategy for Afghanistan, we’ll take a sweeping trek across this terrain.

David Kilcullen weighs in at The Small Wars Journal Blog with Crunch Time in Afghanistan-Pakistan (an edited version of his statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan, 5th February 2009).  We’ll return to what Kilcullen says shortly, but first, there is a particular comment that runs in the same vein as the many of the objections to the campaign.  Excerpts are provided below.

… is it not better to cut the losses and leave now?  What is the downside of an immediate departure?  Loss of prestige? We have none to lose with any the groups we’re attempting to defeat.  Loss of deterrence? As Israel will discover, misapplied force encourages rather than discourages resistance. (Didn’t some guy named Galula say that about 50 years ago?)  The Taliban take over? Let them. As with Hamas, the only avenue to a positive outcome for us is to let them attempt to govern. If they succeed and create development and stability, we win. If they fail and destroy their popular support, we win … That al Qaeda will flourish? It’s more an identity than an entity, and we can’t defeat ideas with firepower. External events will determine al Qaeda’s viability.  The instability in Afghanistan spills over into Pakistan? Too late. We pretty much assured that when we underwrote the original mujahedeen back in the 80’s and then walked away after the Red Army bolted …  That heroin will flood the world? Legalize drugs and kill their funding source. (And that of the cartels.) (And we can shift the DEA budget to development work.)  That it will become a training ground (again) for terrorists? As long as there is a sea of disaffected people for them to swim in, terrorists will exist and their camps will be somewhere. True counterterrorism is social work – police, intel, development. The solution is social justice, not combat … Aid workers are a lot cheaper than warfighters, and the rising expectation of Pashtuns, driven by the awareness of their neighbors’ prosperity, will become an existential threat to the Taliban.

This objection to the campaign as it is currently constituted is the classic counterterrorism schema in which kinetic operations are reserved for high value targets and the population is changed from policing actions and social justice.  Seth G. Jones with RAND is a proponent of this model, i.e., that policing and intelligence are the answer to the problem rather than military action.

Aid workers would suffer the same fate as the Polish engineer who was recently executed by the Taliban.

When aid workers have no security they cannot perform the functions of an aid worker.  The Taliban will hardly create a stable regime, and Afghanistan would indeed become a haven again for AQ.  Furthermore, the mission of the Taliban (both Afghan Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban) is harmonizing into one of support for regional control and then confrontation of the West.  Baitullah Mehsud has made it clear that the goals of the TTP have evolved to one of global aspirations: “We want to eradicate Britain and America, and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York, and London.”

If the Taliban ever were just local rogues and thugs who wanted control over money and women, they aren’t now only that.  There has been a dovetailing not only of ideology but of forces as well.  The Tehrik-i-Taliban shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!” There is no distinction.  Bill Roggio has recently written about al Qaeda’s shadow army, operating in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda has reorganized its notorious paramilitary formations that were devastated during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. Al Qaeda has reestablished the predominantly Arab and Asian paramilitary formation that was formerly known as Brigade 055 into a larger, more effective fighting unit known as the Lashkar al Zil, or Shadow Army, a senior US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

The Shadow Army is active primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Northwest Frontier Province, and in eastern and southern Afghanistan, several US military and intelligence officials told The Long War Journal on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

The paramilitary force is well trained and equipped, and has successfully defeated the Pakistani Army in multiple engagements. Inside Pakistan, the Shadow Army has been active in successful Taliban campaigns in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Peshawar, Khyber, and Swat.

In Afghanistan, the Shadow Army has conducted operations against Coalition and Afghan forces in Kunar, Nuristan, Nangahar, Kabul, Logar, Wardak, Khost, Paktika, Paktia, Zabul, Ghazni, and Kandahar provinces.

“The Shadow Army has been instrumental in the Taliban’s consolidation of power in Pakistan’s tribal areas and in the Northwest Frontier Province,” a senior intelligence official said. “They are also behind the Taliban’s successes in eastern and southern Afghanistan. They are helping to pinch Kabul.”

Afghan and Pakistan-based Taliban forces have integrated elements of their forces into the Shadow Army, “especially the Tehrik-e-Taliban and Haqqani Network,” a senior US military intelligence official said. “It is considered a status symbol” for groups to be a part of the Shadow Army.

There are no “reconcilables” in this group or the TTP.  The time delay in conducting legitimate counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has ensured that the Taliban have become radicalized.

Michael Yon has penned a sober (and sobering) analysis of the situation in Afghanistan.

The Iraq war, even during the worst times, never seemed like such a bog.  Yet there is something about our commitment in Afghanistan that feels wrong, as if a bear trap is hidden under the sand … We must also understand that Afghanistan is what it is. The military is acutely aware that Afghanistan is not Iraq.  The success we are seeing in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly occur in Afghanistan.  If we are to deal with moderate elements of the AOGs (armed opposition groups) we must do so from a position of strength, and this means killing a lot of them this year, to encourage the surviving “reconcilables” to be more reconcilable.

In fact, Dr. John Nagl waxes even darker in his forecast.

Col Nagl, an Iraq veteran who helped devise the successful strategy there under the aegis of Gen David Petraeus, told The Daily Telegraph that the gains made by the Taliban over the past two years need to be reversed by the end of the traditional fighting season in Afghanistan, around late September or early October, or else the Taliban will establish a durable base that would make a sustained Western military presence futile.

The forecast given by The Captain’s Journal to the querry from the MSM journalist was fundamentally that without U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban would be inside of Kabul within two weeks and the Karzai regime would collapse within one month to six weeks.  The Afghan police would be slaughtered, and the Army would last just a little longer than the police.  The Northern Alliance (which has been relegated to the sidelines by the U.S., and supported to some extent by India) would then be at civil war again with the Taliban.  Al Qaeda and a radicalized Taliban (such as the TTP) along with other international jihadist elements would have safe haven from which to train and launch attacks against Pakistan initially, and the West eventually.

To return to what Kilcullen advocates, he advises against the notion of a scaled-back effort performing counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda.  Whether we like it or not, we must provide security for the population and rebuild government legitimacy.  He also contrasts “chasing the Taliban around” with providing security, a dichotomy The Captain’s Journal rejects.  Having enough troops to chase and kill the Taliban should be part of an effective counterinsurgency strategy.  Petraeus has said so himself.

But Kilcullen is fundamentally right.  Counterinsurgency is the only viable option, short of pulling out of Afghanistan come what may.  Counterterrorism-policing operations against high value targets has failed us for six years in Afghanistan, and engaging only the soft side of COIN (i.e., sending more aid workers to rebuild the nation as the military bolted from the country) is a bizarre strategy to say the least.  As for Pakistan?  Again, listen to one Taliban who, when interviewed, gave away valuable intelligence concerning their perspective.  “If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban, its only real allies in the region.”

Afghanistan is as good a place to begin the regional counterinsurgency campaign as anywhere.

Global Politician has an interesting article up entitled Analysis of al-Qaeda’s World View.  It’s a slow-moving article, and seems to go a little soft on al Qaeda at a few points (seeming to acquiesce to the notion of validity to AQ complaints), but returns to a sensible enumeration of the AQ world view by the end of the article (and even a forceful confrontation of the idea that we can co-exist with jihadists).  There are several key money quotes provided below that show the universal and eternal nature of the jihad they are to wage.

All of the above clearly demonstrates that, for al-Qa’ida, the war with the West is not finite but eternal. The current battles may ostensibly revolve around U.S. presence in Islamic lands, or support for Israel, or support for secular though dictatorial regimes, or even oil. Even so, the ultimate war does not end with a cessation of these real or perceived injustices, but rather with the West’s–indeed, the rest of the non-Islamic world’s–submission to Islam. As the words of Usama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri–all grounded in the traditional sources of Islam–make clear, the war with the West revolves around something more transcendent than temporal grievances. It revolves around “eternal truths” …

Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until Allah Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Ladin–may Allah protect them from all evil–are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of jihad, while the struggle between Truth and Falsehood transcends time. [p. 182]

The bottom line is, perceived Western injustices–as propagated by bin Ladin’s mantras–have nothing to do with the ultimate source of hostilities between Islam and the West (Infidelity). The doctrine of Offensive Jihad, spreading the laws of Allah to every corner of the world by the sword and enforcing the practice of dhimmitude (that is, discriminating and humiliating those who, having been conquered and living under Islamic suzerainty, still do not embrace Islam officially), was and remains a basic tenant of Islam–well before it ever encountered the West.

Fight those amongst the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden [i.e. enforce Shari’a law], and who do not embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the Jizya with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued. [Koran 9:29]

The word “until” (hata) highlights the perpetual nature of this command. Enmity for non-Muslims, irrespective of whether or not they harm the Muslim is also a basic tenant of the faith, established before Islam and the West met:

“O you who have believed! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are but friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them [i.e., he apostasies from Islam].” [Koran 5:51] …

At this point many will proclaim that al-Qa’ida is misusing, misinterpreting, or taking these otherwise straightforward verses out of context. That is hardly the point here: Even if this were true, that does not change the fact that many men before al-Qa’ida, going back to the first jihads of the seventh century, have also “misused” them, or that many today who have nothing to do with al-Qa’ida, “misinterpret them,” or ultimately that many after al-Qa’ida will also be taking them “out of context.” In other words, even if those verses really do not mean what they seem to be saying, they certainly led themselves to the sort of hostile interpretation that al-Qa’ida and other Islamists, past, present and future, give to them. This is all the more troubling since it took only 19 men who follow such “interpretations” to cause September 11.

This is a very sophisticated understanding of hermeneutics, one I have addressed before with Professor Steve Metz of the U.S. Army War College.  There are competing hermeneutics within Islam that live side by side every day, and it doesn’t matter which one is right (since Islam is fundamentally not a creedal religion, and even if the majority in Islam do not believe in violent jihad).  What matters is which one is held, and in the case of jihadists, the hermeneutic held is one that places it at eternal war with the West.  This isn’t our decision – it’s a function of things far beyond our control.

Like many of you, I watched the 60 Minutes exposé on the special forces hunt for Osama bin Laden. My reaction was probably unlike most, but typical of the articles that frequent The Captain’s Journal. But more on my reactions in a moment. While we don’t normally interface with posts at other sites on a regular basis, this one is an exception that warrants special attention because of the salient points to be made on the campaign in Afghanistan. Christian at Defense Tech has an important post up on the whole sordid affair (you’ll see why it’s sordid momentarily).

So, after I posted the last thread, I went over to a forum that’s populated with no-joke special operations forces troops and looked at the discussion on the KBL/ Dalton Fury imbroglio. Man is it hot in there.

Apparently, Dalton Fury’s real name is Maj. Thomas Greer. I was wrong in thinking he was Pete Blaber, though it does turn out from the discussion that Blaber has a book of his own coming out called “The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander” that’s supposed to be available in December.

These operators at the forum are none too kind to a guy who’s attempting to “profit” from revealing covert operations covered under top secret non disclosure agreements. They skewer him and smoke his body over a pit of coals. But none of them disputes who he is, what he’s done or how the mission went down. There’s little comment about the actual 60 Minutes broadcast, though it would have been helpful if the reporters had mentioned the controversy Fury has caused and held fast on calling him by his real name (I did a search and his name comes up as a faculty member of American Military University). Once it’s out in the open, it looks a little ridiculous for a reputable news organization to stick to a pseudonym.

As a reporter who’s covered the military for a decade, I get a little annoyed at the knuckle-dragger attitude that someone who says anything about their covert activity should be banished. Give me a break. That attitude perpetuates an elitist, Samurai mentality that says “you don’t need to know. Just trust us, we know what we’re doing…”

Sorry, but I — and millions of other Americans — pay your salary and we damned right want to know what you’re doing. You work for us. So I’m glad, as long as it doesn’t deliberately put lives in danger of death (like the politically-motivated CIA tell-alls did back in the ’70s), that these stories come out. There’s been seven years between then and now, surely Delta and CIA have new ways of doing things that aren’t compromised by this book.

There is also a discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal in which it is concluded that this individual is the “real deal,” and it spends some time on the efforts at redaction that occurred between Greer and SOCOM. Good grief. Let’s go straight out of the gate and make our position clear. The Captain’s Journal doesn’t care who Greer is or if he is the “real deal” (any more than we care about the commenters at Defense Tech) except insofar as it goes to accuracy of his account and hence the ability to critique our strategy.

Further, the comment thread at Defense Tech is as brutal to Christian as the original one to which he points. I won’t waste time rehearsing it, but one particularly obnoxious example is this by someone with the pseudonym Krag (these people never use their real names):

Pathetic. You want to know…TS. Join an elite unit and then you’ll know. Otherwise, quit whining. The military doesn’t “work for” you or any other whining civvie. We work for the preservation of the Constitution. You pay taxes of which a small portion goes to pay for your collective defense…that entitles you to squat as to TTPs and classified information.

Get over yourself.

Congratulations Krag! Drop your dumbass pseudonym, tell The Captain’s Journal your real name and address, and we’ll send your B.A. degree in navel-gazing. But as for this elitist mentality and cloak-and-dagger secrecy, how do you say it in contemporary slang? The Captain’s Journal isn’t down with that.

If something is OPSEC, then it can’t be released. If it isn’t then it’s free game. Period. It shouldn’t be any more complex than that. TTPs can be OPSEC too, and the decision simply must be made as to whether the information is or isn’t OPSEC. Then we can move forward with the information, commentary and analysis.

Our position on special forces has been made clear before. We are a Marine blog. In the Marines, no one is special – or everyone is special, depending upon your perspective. Infantry is king, and every billet supports infantry. We are opposed to Recon being separated from the infantry unit they support. The Captain’s Journal supports the notion that special forces should be seen as specialized billets, not supermen who maintain a cloak-and-dagger secrecy, separated from the units they support.

On a related note, I could only chuckle when I recently watched the Navy SEALS (Military Channel) as they did their 6 mile run with a 50 lb. backpack, after which they qualified at 100 yards with a rifle (Marines qualify at 500 yards). In the Marines, a day that causes you to say “my life sucks” might include a 20 mile hump on a 100 degree F day with full body armor, backpack, SAW and three drums of ammunition, and hydration system (for a total of 120 pounds) followed by squad rushes for 1000 meters in the mud with live ammunition, followed by the Gunny telling you that the Lt. Col. has decided that we have two weeks to get everyone to the next belt in the MCMAP, so we get to “stay in the field, commune with nature and beat the hell out of each other for the next two weeks.” But I digress into the very thing with which I charge the “special” people.

Since we have now dispatched the juvenile navel-gazing and the “we’re so special, can’t you all see how we’re so special, tell us we’re special” mentality and can consider the things we learned on 60 Minutes (we didn’t learn much beyond what we already knew), our reaction was as our regular readers might imagine it to be. “There you have it in all its glory – the stupid Rumsfeld legacy.”

Air Force special operators with satellite uplinks guiding JDAMS to target, CIA operatives making shady deals with halfway reliable (or all the way unreliable) allies, Delta Force operators in the background, gizmos, gadgets and thingamajigs, tribal elements in the foreground, minute-by-minute radio communications on the whereabouts of UBL, and cloak-and-dagger secrecy after the fact … it all makes for interesting television, civilian amazement, and even more honest books about the abject failure of the Rumsfeld strategy in Afghanistan.

Marines are always in ready reserve, and if their forces needed supplementing, the 82nd or 101st Airborne should have been able to respond to the need of the moment. There is absolutely no replacement for infantry, and in this case, terrain control, interdiction and authority over transit was the solution to the problem. Infantry could have provided this, special forces could not. We let UBL escape, and it was not the fault of special forces. It was Rumsfeld’s fault. It was a strategic blunder.

It isn’t a reflection on their specialized billets, their capabilities or their commitment. It’s a function of force projection. Special forces cannot supply the force projection necessary to win counterinsurgencies. Only infantry can do this. This is what we learn when we put aside the sophomoric posturing over who’s special and who isn’t.

Major General Charles Dunlap, Jr., defends the heavy use of air power in Operation Enduring Freedom.

“Tanks and armor are not a big deal — the planes are the killers. I can handle everything but the jet fighters.” This recent conversation between Taliban commanders, intercepted by U.S. intelligence officers, does much to explain the frenzied efforts of their propaganda machine to ban the use of the weapon they fear most: airpower …

What is frustrating them? Modern U.S. and coalition airpower. Relentless aerial surveillance and highly precise bombing turn Taliban efforts to overrun the detachments into crushing defeats. And the Taliban have virtually no weapons to stop our planes.

Instead, they are trying to use sophisticated propaganda techniques to create a political crisis that will shoot down the use of airpower as effectively as any anti-aircraft gun.

Indeed, it may have been the very heavy use of air power thus far which has prevented total loss of the campaign given the underresourced effort (with respect to infantry), but while air power can participate heavily and even prevent the loss of the campaign in this case, it cannot win. Troops on the ground must accomplish that task, even if they utilize air power to assist them.

The Captain’s Journal has called for more troops in the campaign, stating that the recent addition of a few thousand troops will not be nearly enough (and General McKiernan agrees with this assessment). But contrary to our position, Fred Kaplan weighs in on why he believes that a surge will not work in Afghanistan.

… the situation in Iraq bears little resemblance to that of Afghanistan. Barnett Rubin, a professor at New York University and author of several books about the country, spells out some of the differences:

Iraq’s insurgency is based in Iraq; Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are based mainly across the border in Pakistan. Iraq is urban, educated, and has great wealth, at least potentially, in its oil supplies; Afghanistan is rural, largely illiterate, and ranks as one of the world’s five poorest countries. Iraq has some history as a cohesive nation (albeit as the result of a minority ruling sect oppressing the majority); Afghanistan never has and, given its geography, perhaps never will.

Moreover, the Taliban’s insurgency is ideological, not ethno-sectarian (except incidentally). Therefore, while some warlords and tribes have allied themselves with the Taliban for opportunistic or nationalistic reasons, and therefore might be peeled away and co-opted, the conditions are not ripe for some sort of Taliban or Pashtun “Awakening.” Nor is there any place where walls might isolate the insurgents.

Kaplan then tells us what he believes is possible for the campaign.

The ultimate military goal—one lesson from Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq that is worth learning and might be applicable—is to protect the Afghan population, and that requires putting a lot of troops in the neighborhoods of towns and villages, to provide security and build trust. It might be possible to do this in Afghanistan, just as it was done in many Iraqi neighborhoods with one important difference—it has to be done by the Afghan National Army, not by us.

There are a few reasons for this. First, we simply can’t do it. Stephen Biddle—a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was an adviser on some aspects of Iraq strategy—estimates that securing the Afghan population would require about 500,000 troops. That’s 10 times the combined number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan now. We don’t have anywhere near this level of manpower to spare (the three extra U.S. brigades under consideration would amount to about 12,000 troops), and even if we did, and even if we wanted to send them, we’d have no way to maintain them. (In Iraq, Saddam Hussein left behind a robust logistical network, including paved highways and lots of air bases with long runways; Afghanistan has nothing of the sort.)

Second, unlike in Iraq—where sectarian clashes required U.S. troops to step in (Sunnis wouldn’t trust Shiite troops, and Shiites wouldn’t trust Sunni troops)—the Afghan army is seen as, and actually is, a national institution. Given the right resources, it could do the job … And that leads to something that we and other countries could do—pour lots and lots of money into Afghanistan, so the government can equip, train, and pay a much larger national army.

These are some pregnant paragraphs by Kaplan, and bear some unpacking to acertain both the wisdom and folly in them. Kaplan is right concerning the absence of an awakening of the sort that occurred in the Anbar Province. This is the subject of a debate we’ve had at the Small Wars Council, and we maintain our position that while a few insignificant Taliban may be able to be peeled away from the force, in the end it will have little if any effect on the effort. The ideological connection between the Taliban and al Qaeda that led to safe haven in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 remains, and rather than be introduced to the foreign notion of radical Islamic Sharia as did the Anbaris, the Taliban have no need of such an introduction.

So if the U.S. isn’t (and shouldn’t be) interested in forming another fledgling democracy in an otherwise strictly Islamic region, why should we care if they rule their people via Sharia? The answer comes not in Sharia, but in the symbiotic connection between the Taliban and al Qaeda we mentioned above, i.e., friendship with and support of globalists.

The Taliban of Afghanistan prior to 9/11 were not so much focused on global jihad as was al Qaeda, but the seeds for the ideology were present enough for the Taliban to grant safe haven to al Qaeda. With the advent of the Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan (TTP), a new order has come about and the Taliban have clearly said that their focus is global. Terrorists are flooding in from around the world to be trained for global jihad in Baitullah Mehsud’s camps. The Tehrik-i-Taliban are hard core radicals, and shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!” There is no distinction.

In spite of the demand by the principles of counterinsurgency to build roads, schools, power grids and infrastructure, the population has clearly said that they demand security from the Taliban threat instead. The Anbar awakening occurred with indigenous, non-al Qaeda fighters who had no love for extremism. It didn’t occur with al Qaeda. To believe that an “awakening” can occur within the Taliban is analogous to faith that al Qaeda will turn against itself. They – al Qaeda and the Taliban – are one and the same.

Kaplan’s proposal that it will require half a million U.S. troops to provide security for the population of Afghanistan isn’t far off the mark set by Australian Major General Jim Molan.

International forces in Afghanistan are repeating mistakes made in Iraq by failing to commit sufficient troops, a recently retired Australian army general said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Jim Molan said he could see parallels between the worsening situation in Afghanistan and the months after the defeat of the Iraqi military when he commanded 300,000 troops in Iraq as Chief of Operations for the U.S.-led multinational force in 2004 and 2005.

“The biggest error that we made in the second year of the war in Iraq, 2004, was that we didn’t have unity of effort or command, and we didn’t have a comprehensive plan and we didn’t have sufficient troops,” Molan, who retired from the army this year, said in a lecture to a conservative think-tank.

“We are making exactly the same mistake now, and although none of us has done much, the Americans have moved in and solved the unity of effort by putting one of their people in command of everything,” he said of U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who took over the NATO command in Afghanistan in June.

“There’s a chance now they’ll get a comprehensive plan up — it’s going to be difficult working with NATO … and I think we are years away from getting anything that approaches sufficient troops into Afghanistan,” he added.

Molan estimated about 500,000 troops were needed in Afghanistan, where there are currently 65,000 foreign troops and 62,000 Afghanistan National Army soldiers.

“The aim of the Taliban is to get into the cities and fight us like they’re fighting us in Iraq,” Mola said.

“Iraq is what Afghanistan will be if the Taliban get back into the cities and nothing will change,” he added.

Australia is the largest contributor to Afghanistan outside NATO. There are 1,000 Australian troops in the central Asian country.

Molan dismissed the Australian government’s argument that it did not have sufficient troops to send more.

“I believe we can afford to put more troops in and I believe we can afford to sustain them, but it would require governments to back that idea up,” Molan said.

But he said the onus was on NATO to commit the thousands of additional troops required to win the conflict.

Quite obviously the U.S. doesn’t have half a million troops to provide security for Afghanistan. Australia must change as well as the balance of NATO (regarding rules of engagement). Currently, Australia allows only its special forces to engage kinetic operations, and other Australian forces are limited to force protection—rigidly imposed to the point whereby participants have been required to sign formal documents declaring that they have not provoked combat operations.

But if NATO should do more, so should the U.S. whose generals have claimed that Operation Enduring Freedom is an underresourced campaign for several years. The Captain’s Journal has gone on record stating that the U.S. is losing the campaign because of degrading security. Following this article, Andrew Lubin wrote to tell us that:

The downside of “getting the word out” is that lots of people don’t like to read it. You wrote a good piece (and have always done so); and I hope you will continue. Did you see yesterday’s lead editorial in the NY Times “Afghanistan on Fire”…you need to read it. I spent June over there; it’s worse than you can imagine; it’s like Iraq in 2004-2005.

Now Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies has written a comprehensive report entitled Losing the Afghan-Pakistan War?: The Rising Threat. In this analysis Cordesman concludes that the Taliban have turned much of Afghanistan into “no-go zones.”

The map above shows insurgent activities in 2007, and the rate of attacks in 2008 has been higher than in 2007. The darker red indicates the areas with permanent Taliban presence. The “border” between Afghanistan and Pakistan effectively doesn’t exist.

The erstwhile capital city of the Taliban, Kandahar, is in obvious need of protection against the thugery and oppression by the Taliban.

The neat rows of new homes in the gated community sit behind freshly painted three-metre-high cement walls and rows of manicured shrubs.

Pavements lined with imported eucalyptus trees border smoothly paved streets that fill at twilight with cyclists and walkers. Further back, another cluster of houses is being built, including an eight-bedroom villa with a pool, wraparound deck and balcony supported by doric columns.

Residents at the Aino Mina housing development also have access to a mosque, two private schools, football fields, playgrounds and private armed guards on duty 24 hours a day. A hospital, supermarket, pizza parlour and golf course are also planned.

But, despite luxuries rivalling those found in exclusive suburban communities in the United States, many owners are trying to sell or rent out their homes. Others have temporarily abandoned properties. The reason is as simple as the long-standing estate agent’s maxim: location, location, location.

This upmarket residential neighbourhood is situated on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kandahar – one of the most volatile and lawless provinces of Afghanistan. Others call the area the heartbeat of the Taliban, the place where the group formed in the early 1990s and where it is, by all accounts, re-establishing itself today.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Sayed Hakim Kallmi, a 40-year-old hotel manager, said as he stood on the pavement outside his dream home in Aino Mina. He was watching his son and three of his six daughters play with neighbours. “There’s no security here” …

Taliban operatives have made no secret of their campaign to intimidate residents of Aino Mina. Ahmadi, who described himself as a spokesman for the group, said: “We seriously warn people not to buy here. Those who stay there and who buy there will be held responsible for the actions we take against them later.”

Residents and workers in the development say the Taliban have targeted the area and maintain an unmistakable presence. During a sweltering July afternoon, a thickly bearded man in a shalwar kameez with a turban wrapped around his head rode a motorcycle along the nearly empty streets of Aino Mina with an AK-47 strapped across his back. The motorbike and the AK-47 both are long-favoured hallmarks of the Taliban.

Despite the rider, a handful of construction workers at the project hauled wheelbarrows full of dirt, lugged slabs of concrete and scaled bamboo ladders. Naik Mohammed, 28, pointed to a two-story townhouse and said Taliban militants had recently looted the elegant dwelling and demanded protection money from its occupants.

“They told the owners to pay $200,000 and they would allow them to live there peacefully and they won’t kill them,” Mohammed said. “The family left the next day.”

Admiral Mullen himself – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – has said that time is running out on Afghanistan. The push to treat the campaign against the Taliban as a counterterrorism operation against so-called high value targets with limited force presence and small footprint has enabled Taliban control of the human terrain. The fact that neither the U.S. nor NATO has 500,000 troops to dedicate to Operation Enduring Freedom is not an excuse for continued failure to ramp up troop presence to capture and kill Taliban and train Afghan troops to do the same.

The objection that the U.S. cannot contribute 500,000 troops must be placed in context. There are currently just over 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, somewhere around one fifth of the forces in Iraq. Before the defeatists howl that the campaign cannot be won, it is prudent to take the campaign seriously and listen to the Generals when they declare it to be an underresourced campaign.

The battle of wanat where nine U.S. soldiers were killed and fifteen wounded is indicative of more than just that the Taliban can conduct larger scale operations when they desire. No Afghan troops died in the engagement, since the U.S. forces took the brunt of the punishment. It will be protracted period of time before Afghan troops can be relied upon perform kinetic operations sufficiently enough to push back Taliban presence in Afghanistan without significant U.S. force projection.

Further, religiously motivated fighters (jihadists and globalists) and thugs and criminals who extort thousands of dollars from the population must be captured or killed. We can no more reconcile with these elements than we did with al Qaeda in Anbar. While al Qaeda attacked and brutalized the Anbaris, the indigenous insurgents for the most part did not. Their attacks were reserved for U.S. forces until being killed or captured to the point that their ranks were decimated by U.S. Marines, the rest being co-opted by U.S. dollars and protection. Al Qaeda was never offered dollars for reconciliation.  They were simply killed.  Concerning reconciliation with an insurgency, it is important to get this distinction correct.

Other Resources:

A Wild Frontier (The Economist): Yet a devious Pakistani strategy of failing to crack down on cross-border violence is not the only reason it persists, nor the main one. A better explanation, given the fraught, radicalised and ungoverned state of north-western Pakistan, and the many dead soldiers there, is that the army could not make a much better fist of controlling the border, even if it did its damnedest. And moreover, it may be afraid to pursue its campaign more vigorously, for two reasons. Pakistani officials suggest that, despite battling the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas, the army is reluctant to attack the Afghan Taliban, allegedly led from Peshawar and from Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, for fear of worsening security problems in those places. Secondly, the campaign is unpopular, in the army and elsewhere, precisely because Pakistanis think it is being waged for America.

A Modernized Taliban Thrives in Afghanistan (Washington Post) : Just one year ago, the Taliban insurgency was a furtive, loosely organized guerrilla force that carried out hit-and-run ambushes, burned empty schools, left warning letters at night and concentrated attacks in the southern rural regions of its ethnic and religious heartland. Today it is a larger, better armed and more confident militia, capable of mounting sustained military assaults. Its forces operate in virtually every province and control many districts in areas ringing the capital. Its fighters have bombed embassies and prisons, nearly assassinated the president, executed foreign aid workers and hanged or beheaded dozens of Afghans. The new Taliban movement has created a parallel government structure that includes defense and finance councils and appoints judges and officials in some areas. It offers cash to recruits and presents letters of introduction to local leaders. It operates Web sites and a 24-hour propaganda apparatus that spins every military incident faster than Afghan and Western officials can manage

U.S. Seeks Sweeping Changes in Command Structure for Afghanistan (The Captain’s Journal): Without drastic changes in the nature of the mission of NATO troops, it is doubtful that even placing them under the command of General Petraeus will change much. This is partly why we have recommended more U.S. troops. Petraeus must have access to resources that will operate with regard to unity of command, unity of strategy and unity of mission. Time is short in the campaign, Pakistan’s intentions cannot be trusted, and the security situation is degrading.

Fighting a Technologically Advanced Insurgency (The Captain’s Journal): Both the U.S. DoD and the British MoD should invest as necessary to stay ahead in technology. But we must not miss the point concerning technology. Playing the game of one-step-ahead is a deadly and costly way to run a campaign. The solution to the problem of Taliban technology is to conduct intelligence driven raids against the Taliban who perpetrate the use of such technology. Rather than the so-called high value targets with recognizable names, the real high value targets are the Taliban perpetrators, the fighters, technicians and practitioners.

The Cult of Special Forces (The Captain’s Journal): But the advent of each new story about SOF that kills some high profile name, while riveting for the non-military reader, continues the same lesson that Rumsfeld took into Afghanistan with his vision of airmen with satellite uplinks guiding JDAMS to target, CIA operatives, and alliances with rogues in the country who could knock out the Taliban. Afghanistan is a failing campaign precisely because of this view. Counterinsurgency requires infantry and force projection, those things necessary to ensure security for the population.

Interview with Taliban Spokesman Maulvi Omar (The Captain’s Journal):

Q: What is the difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban? Have they any relation?

A: There is no difference. The formation of the Taliban and al Qaeda was based on an ideology. Today, Taliban and al Qaeda have become an ideology. Whoever works in these organizations, they fight against kafir (infidel) cruelty. Both are fighting for the supremacy of Allah and his Kalma. However, those fighting in foreign countries are called al Qaeda, while those fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan are called Taliban. In fact, both are the name of one ideology. The aim and objectives of both the organizations are the same.

Senator Joseph Lieberman deserves our thanks for tireless work to convince Google, owner of YouTube, to ban al Qaeda.

Senator Joseph Lieberman claims to have struck a mighty blow against the forces of al Qaeda this week by pressuring YouTube to forbid users from uploading terrorist training videos.

The popular video site updated its “Community Guidelines” yesterday, warning terrorist cells they’re at serious risk of violating the site’s Terms of Service — and may even face having their YouTube accounts permanently terminated.

The Connecticut Senator celebrated victory for his three month campaign in a press release circulated September 11 titled, “Google Tightens Standards for YouTube Videos in Response to Lieberman’s Pressure.”

“YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States, and Google should be commended for recognizing that,” Lieberman said in a statement. “I expect these stronger community guidelines to decrease the number of videos on YouTube produced by al Qaeda and affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations.”

Google makes no mention of Lieberman in its community blog outlining the policy change.

“We’ve updated the Community Guidelines to address some of the most common questions users ask us about inappropriate content. Included in the update are a few things to steer clear of, like not directly inciting violence or encouraging other users to violate the Terms of Service.”

Lieberman writes he is grateful for the response, but continues to urge Google to remove all videos produced by “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”, not just those that violate its community guidelines.

Intriguingly, his efforts may have also unintentionally thwarted another subversive group threatening Lady Liberty from the shadows. YouTube’s revised policy now forbids “things like instructional bomb making, ninja assassin training, sniper attacks, videos that train terrorists, or tips on illegal street racing. Any depictions like these should be educational or documentary and shouldn’t be designed to help or encourage others to imitate them.”

Actually, YouTube allegedly bans a little more than the list above.

“Things like predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the Terms of Use are taken very seriously. Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.”

A brief search of YouTube found some radical Islamist preachings, including some from Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader Ayman al Zawahiri, but no violent clips.

So any violent videos will be banned in the future. But what about Ayman al-Zawahiri’s prose? It should be deleted. The reactionary and hysterical among us might scream censorship, and demand to know who the censor will be? The Captain’s Journal says that this is simple. The censor will do the censoring. In this case, Google would be the censor, and they have guidelines as stated above (” … inciting others to commit violent acts”).

We support free speech, including the right to criticize or lampoon the current leadership or political policies. What we don’t support is sedition and violent overthrow of the West as does al Qaeda. But it is a remarkable and positive step that Google – the very same Google who caved to Chinese pressure to censor for political views – would take this self-imposed step to censor al Qaeda. What took so long, and why can’t the decision regarding China be reversed? After all, we might be seeing signs of discernment, guts and fortitude.  Or perhaps not.

Dexter Filkins of the New York Times Magazine has written a very important article on the state of affairs in the so-called tribal region of Pakistan, entitled Right at the Edge. One particular exchange stands out as indicative of the game-playing by the Pakistani Army over the last four years.

ONE SWELTERING AFTERNOON in July, I ventured into the elegant home of a former Pakistani official who recently retired after several years of serving in senior government posts. We sat in his book-lined study. A servant brought us tea and biscuits.

Was it the obsession with India that led the Pakistani military to support the Taliban? I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

Or is it the anti-Americanism and pro-Islamic feelings in the army?

“Yes,” he said, that too.

And then the retired Pakistani official offered another explanation — one that he said could never be discussed in public. The reason the Pakistani security services support the Taliban, he said, is for money: after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani military concluded that keeping the Taliban alive was the surest way to win billions of dollars in aid that Pakistan needed to survive. The military’s complicated relationship with the Taliban is part of what the official called the Pakistani military’s “strategic games.” Like other Pakistanis, this former senior official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of what he was telling me.

“Pakistan is dependent on the American money that these games with the Taliban generate,” the official told me. “The Pakistani economy would collapse without it. This is how the game works.”

As an example, he cited the Pakistan Army’s first invasion of the tribal areas — of South Waziristan in 2004. Called Operation Shakai, the offensive was ostensibly aimed at ridding the area of Taliban militants. From an American perspective, the operation was a total failure. The army invaded, fought and then made a deal with one of the militant commanders, Nek Mohammed. The agreement was capped by a dramatic meeting between Mohammed and Safdar Hussein, one of the most senior officers in the Pakistan Army.

“The corps commander was flown in on a helicopter,” the former official said. “They had this big ceremony, and they embraced. They called each other mujahids. ”

“Mujahid” is the Arabic word for “holy warrior.” The ceremony, in fact, was captured on videotape, and the tape has been widely distributed.

“The army agreed to compensate the locals for collateral damage,” the official said. “Where do you think that money went? It went to the Taliban. Who do you think paid the bill? The Americans. This is the way the game works. The Taliban is attacked, but it is never destroyed.

“It’s a game,” the official said, wrapping up our conversation. “The U.S. is being taken for a ride.”

There is another important observation concerning foreigners, tribes and tribal elders.

Waziristan is believed to contain the largest number of militant Arabs and other foreign fighters, possibly even bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. To be more specific about Jan — to use his name, to identify the tribe he leads, to name the town where he lives — would almost certainly, he said, result in his death at the hands of the militants and Taliban fighters who control South Waziristan.

“There are many Arab fighters living in South Waziristan,” Jan told me. “Sometimes you see them in the town; you hear them speaking Arabic.

“But the important Arabs are not in the city,” he continued. “They are in the mountains.”

Important Arabs? I asked.

“They ride horses, Arabian horses; we don’t have horses like this in Waziristan,” Jan said. “The people from the town take food to the Arabs’ horses in the mountains. They have seen the horses. They have seen the Arabs. These horses eat better than the common people in the town.”

How do you know?

“I am a leader of my tribe. People come to me — everyone comes to me. They tell me everything.”

What about Osama? I asked. Is he in South Waziristan?

“Osama?” Jan said. “I don’t know. But they” — the Arabs in the mountains — “are important.”

The labor it took to persuade Jan to speak to me is a measure of what has become of the area over which his family still officially presides. Since it was not possible for me to go to South Waziristan — “Baitullah Mehsud would cut off your head,” the Taliban leader, Namdar, told me — I had to persuade Jan to come to Peshawar. For several days, military checkpoints and roadblocks made it impossible for Jan to travel. Finally, after two weeks, Jan left his home at midnight in a taxi so no one would notice either him or his car.

Jan had reason to worry. Seven members of his family — his father, two brothers, two uncles and two cousins — have been murdered by militants who inhabit the area. Jan said he believed his father was killed by Uzbek and Tajik gunmen who fled to South Waziristan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. His father had opposed them. Jan’s cousins, he said, were killed by men working for Baitullah Mehsud. Jan’s father was a malik, and thousands of Waziri tribesmen came to his funeral: “the largest funeral in the history of Waziristan,” Jan said.

The rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda has come at the expense of the maliks, who have been systematically murdered and marginalized in a campaign to destroy the old order. In South Waziristan, where Mehsud presides, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have killed more than 150 maliks since 2005, all but destroying the tribal system. And there are continual reminders of what happens to the survivors who do not understand this — who, for example, attempt to talk with Pakistan’s civilian government and assert their authority. In June, Mehsud’s men gunned down 28 tribal leaders who had formed a “peace committee” in South Waziristan. Their bodies were dumped on the side of a road. “This shows what happens when the tribal elders try to challenge Baitullah Mehsud,” Jan said.

We have been ham-handed in the conduct of the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are seasons in counterinsurgency, and we are almost certainly witnessing the end of tribe in Pakistan. While it might have been possible three or four years ago to have unilaterally acted in Pakistan to destroy the Taliban, and / or to pressure Pakistan to act against them, all of the while incorporating the tribes as was done in the Anbar Province, this is no longer possible. Tribe has been destroyed.

This season is gone, and another strategy must be pursued. This strategy appears to be fully in effect now, cannot rely on the Pakistan Army, and involves aggressive action inside the borders of Pakistan.

American military forces are stepping up cross-border ground attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the last two weeks, the military has begun launching ground assaults in the Pakistani border provinces known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, American intelligence and military officials said. The region is believed by American and Pakistani intelligence to be hosting the leadership of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden.

While American special forces and military contractors have conducted raids in Pakistan, such actions were rare and required Cabinet-level approval. In July, the leadership of Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was given the sole authority to approve ground assaults in Pakistan. Late last month, the American military began launching ground attacks in the country on a near daily basis, depending on local conditions and intelligence, according to a military official who requested anonymity.

These small raids won’t be enough, but at least the threshold has been crossed. The U.S. is now taking unilateral action inside the borders of Pakistan, as the Pakistan Army won’t carry out its duties to control the region, and the Taliban are using Pakistan as a launching, training and recovery base for its campaign in Afghanistan. As The Captain’s Journal has pointed out before, the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan is one and the same.

The Captain’s Journal has previously discussed the kinetic operations in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of the Pakistan tribal area, along with the stand down of these operations over Ramadan. It now appears that the entire effort was a high value target initiative.

The Pakistani military has halted operations in Bajaur Agency in the northwest of the country, saying “the back has been broken” of the militancy there.

A military spokesman said that in light of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday, all action would stop, which would allow about 500,000 displaced people to return home. Officials claim that in three weeks of fighting 560 militants have been killed, with the loss of 20 members of the security forces.

The ground reality, though, is that the operation failed in its primary objective, to catch the big fish so wanted by the United States – al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. This would have been the perfect present for Islamabad to give the George W Bush administration in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November.

Pakistan said they had Zawahiri in their sights, but he evaded them. Zawahiri, who has a US$25 million bounty on his head, escaped a US missile strike in January 2006 near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The Bajaur operation was a comprehensive joint show of power by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Pakistan forces as they were convinced that the al-Qaeda leaders and other senior Taliban militants were in an area spanning Kunar and Nooristan provinces in Afghanistan and the Bajaur and Mohamad agencies immediately across the border in Pakistan.

NATO and the Pakistani military had hoped that a pincer operation would force their prey to move their base, thereby exposing them. The thinking was that the militants would seek refuge inside Pakistan, where they could be cornered.

The mission began disastrously, though. Two days before troops were ordered from the corps headquarters of Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) early last month, news of the impending attack was leaked to the militants and the al-Qaeda leadership was hastily moved. The Pakistani forces also received an unwelcome – and unexpected – reception when they began operations in Bajaur; the militants were armed and waiting …

Pakistan and NATO had placed high store on a successful mission, launching the heaviest-ever aerial bombardment inside Pakistan’s tribal regions – hence the high level of displaced persons. The militants claim that many dozens of paramilitary troops were killed and many captured, along with their heavy weapons and tanks.

The assault continued for several more weeks, but on August 28 during a secret meeting on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and the chief of the Pakistani Army Staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, it was agreed the Bajaur mission had failed. No key militants had been hit and they had now completely fallen off all radar screens.

The Asia Times can exaggerate the facts from time to time, but in this instance they seem to have gotten the facts basically correct. In fact, an official Pakistan government press release admits the failure of the operations.

Pakistani troops in the country’s tribal areas recently discovered the location of Al Qaeda’s number two but “missed” a chance to capture him, according to the politician who oversees Pakistan’s Frontier Corps.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior ministry chief, told a group of foreign journalists that the military obtained evidence Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife was in the Mohmand agency, near the border with Afghanistan.

“We did raids and traces there,” said Malik, who manages the underfunded front-line forces fighting militants in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. “Certainly we had traced him in one place, but we missed him. Certainly he is moving in Mohmand Agency and Kunar, mostly in Kunar and Paktika,” referring to two areas across the border in Afghanistan. He did not give specific details of when the raids took place.

Publicly, U.S. officials will not comment on Malik’s claims, but privately senior officials tell ABC News they are skeptical and have seen no evidence that Zawahiri was narrowly missed.

Malik claimed that that “50-60” foreign al Qaeda leaders were currently hiding in Pakistan, and admitted to some frustration over Pakistan’s inability to capture the most wanted terrorists in the world. “Whoever’s it is, his strategy is obviously better than ours,” he said.

Malik’s assertions come despite criticism by the Untied States and some in Pakistan that the military is not doing enough to combat militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. This week the army announced it would temporarily and provisionally halt two campaigns against militants for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Historically, Ramadan has been peaceful, and Malik said the Pakistani military would be judged negatively by Pakistanis if it had not stopped the attacks.

If the operations continued, he said, “we will have a bad image as a Muslim state.”

So either the operations didn’t even succeed in coming close to killing Ayman al-Zawahiri (and U.S. intelligence doubts that it did), or they missed him entirely. In either case, they missed him, and the operations – insofar as they were primarily a high value target initiative – failed.

This last statement in the report (Ramadan and their reputation as an Muslim country) is a poor excuse for the stand down in operations in the NWFP, and the Taliban feel no such moral compunction, but the entire report points to a larger problem with the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is being treated as a counterterrorism campaign rather than a counterinsurgency campaign. While there are new reports every day of a mid-level Taliban commander being killed, The Captain’s Journal doesn’t cover or provide commentary for hits to high value targets or other black operations. The targeting of individuals, while making for intriguing and interesting reading, adds little to the effort to win the population or destroy the enemy.

The Captain’s Journal has long been opposed to the overuse of special operations and the high value target program as an expensive and time consuming initiative that has yielded marginal benefits. Soviet General Gromov had 104,000 troops under his command in Afghanistan (and still lost), and General Petraeus has 32,500. At the moment, NATO and CENTCOM do not have the forces necessary to treat the campaign as a full-orbed counterinsurgency campaign.

This will change, or the campaign will be lost. The recent operations in the NWFP are exemplary of the kind of affects that are seen with repeated and halting starts to kinetic operations, and operations which target individuals: approximately one half million noncombatants are now displaced, and the next time the Pakistan Army needs to conduct operations in the NWFP it will be profoundly more difficult due to the knowledge by the people that it will not redound to success, if history is any indicator of the future.

Special operations cannot win counterinsurgency campaigns. COIN requires infantry in proportions outlined in FM 3-24, and above all, security for the population. Security for the population takes constant contact with both the population and the enemy, until there are no more enemy to cause the insecurity in the first place.

Beginning with Resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda where we discussed the Next-Gen Taliban, and going through Interview with Taliban Spokesman Maulvi Omar, for six months The Captain’s Journal has outlined the synthesis of al Qaeda and the new Taliban.  From adoption of suicide tactics to taking a global perspective for jihad in lieu of the nationalistic one, the differences between al Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan  (TTP) have all but disappeared, with Baitullah Mehsud the most powerful man in the North West Frontier Province as the head of the TTP.

Musharraf wouldn’t publicly admit it, but with his departure at least there is a whiff of honesty in the air concerning the actual state of affairs.

Pakistan’s top security official says the country’s Taliban is a “mouthpiece” of al-Qaida.

“We have certain evidence that there is a close connection, links and that there are similarities between al-Qaida and TTP,” Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik told reporters in Islamabad, Dawn reported Tuesday.

TTP is the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, which was banned by the government last month after being blamed for a series of suicide attacks, which killed hundreds of people, the report said.

Malik, responding to a question whether Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, talks to the TTP, said, “If al-Qaida is to move in a tribal area, they have to look to the TTP” to find refuge, the report said.

“The TTP is a host to al-Qaida and is their mouthpiece,” he added.

Noting that there is evidence of foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, Malik said, “We have also found traces of militants from the Uzbek and … Chinese Islamic movements in the tribal regions.”

Again, this marks a change in position by the Pakistani government.

Pakistani authorities previously sought to draw a sharp distinction between homegrown militants and al-Qaida, which is led by Arabs. But the interior ministry official declared that al-Qaida had morphed into Pakistan’s Taliban movement, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban, which is a copy of the Afghanistan’s Taliban guerillas.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the Tehreek-e-Taliban and al-Qaida are the same thing,” Malik said. “They have not only connections, I would say Tehreek-e-Taliban is an extension of al-Qaida. The mouthpiece is now Tehreek-e-Taliban.”

Readers of The Captain’s Journal have heard this for a half a year or more, and while a stand down of operations by the Pakistan Army over Ramadan is not encouraging, at least Pakistan realizes that their very existence is at stake in this war.

The NEFA Foundation has recently released another video, this one an important interview of chief Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar.

The entire interview is slightly over nine minutes, and is worth the time.  Some excerpts are given below, with commentary by The Captain’s Journal.

Q: What is the difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban?  Have they any relation?

A: There is no difference.  The formation of the Taliban and al Qaeda was based on an ideology.  Today, Taliban and al Qaeda have become an ideology.  Whoever works in these organizations, they fight against kafir (infidel) cruelty.  Both are fighting for the supremacy of Allah and his Kalma.  However, those fighting in foreign countries are called al Qaeda, while those fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan are called Taliban.  In fact, both are the name of one ideology.  The aim and objectives of both the organizations are the same.

The Captain’s Journal has discussed before what Nicholas Schmidle calls the Next-Gen Taliban.  They have adopted suicide tactics, are more brutal in their dealings with the population, and have taken on a global perspective in lieu of the nationalistic ideological approach of ten or twenty years ago.  In Khyber, they shout to passersby “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!”  There is no distinction.

Also as we have discussed before, the plot hatched within the Pakistan ISI to undercut Baitullah Mehsud failed within a week of being implemented.  The Taliban are under the operational control of Mehsud, and his authority is unchallenged.  Note the following words from Omar.

Thank God, among the tribal mujahideen there is unity for which they have rendered great sacrifices.  Among them, there are important personalities like Maulana Fazlullah, Faqir Mohammad and Baitullah Mehsud.  Currently, the entire mujahideen are united under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud.  This is a blessing of God.  Though Baitullah is a young person, it is because of his sincerity, simplicity and piousness that all the tribals are under his command.

The interview continues with a very important question and a much more important answer.

Q: What is your view regarding jihad on the international level?

A: Jihad, as you know, is an important responsibility.  Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) stated 1400 years ago that jihad would continue until doomsday.  Jihad, which the Muslims of the subcontinent and Pashtuns have launched against the injustices and cruelty of anti-Islamic forces.  If they had not committed cruelties, if they had not destroyed Iraq, there would be no fedayeen (suicide attackers).  If they had not occupied Afghanistan, there would be no fedayeen.  Similarly, if they had not attacked the tribal areas, particularly, Bajaur and Waziristan, there would have been no mujahideen and Taliban in such large numbers.  This is also God’s will, who keeps jihad alive in different times.

The ongoing jihad against America and its allies is on one side.  This has benefited Muslims as it has inculcated the importance of jihad in every Muslim heart.  The anti-Muslim forces are on one side.  They are under the name of allies.  The Muslims are on the other side, under the name of jihadis.  This decision has been taken by the Quran 1400 years ago (verses from the Holy Quran), which quoted God as saying when the anti-Muslim forces fight you collectively, you should also fight against them jointly.

In this war, Bush and Musharraf are standing in one row along with there allies, and in the other row Mullah Omar, the Mujahideen and their companions are standing.  This will be the last war between Islam and Kafirs (infidels).  This is a tough war because they (Mujahideen) do not have the support of any Muslim country in the world, nor any other Mujahideen.  This ongoing jihad is harder than any other jihads, but there is still good news, as this will be and is the last war.  And once the Muslims win this war, they can establish an Islamic government throughout the world.

In case one has any doubts about the evolution of the Taliban into a globally focused organization bent on the takeover of not only Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the balance of the world, Omar tells us once again what their ultimate aim is: the establishment of an Islamic government throughout the world.

These are sobering words, underscoring the need to avoid “negotiations” with them, and the corollary need to remove the threat, absolutely and completely.

The always interesting Bill Gertz at the Washington Times has the scoop on a hot debate between the intelligence community and DoD on the use of Special Operations inside Pakistan to kill or capture OBL.

Defense officials are criticizing what they say is the failure to capture or kill top al Qaeda leaders because of timidity on the part of policy officials in the Pentagon, diplomats at the State Department and risk-averse bureaucrats within the intelligence community.

Military special operations forces (SOF) commandos are frustrated by the lack of aggressiveness on the part of several policy and intelligence leaders in pursuing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen, who are thought to have hidden inside the tribal areas of Pakistan for the past 6½ years.

The focus of the commandos’ ire, the officials say, is the failure to set up bases inside Pakistan’s tribal region, where al Qaeda has regrouped in recent months, setting up training camps where among those being trained are Western-looking terrorists who can pass more easily through security systems. The lawless border region inside Pakistan along the Afghan border remains off-limits to U.S. troops.

The officials say that was not always the case. For a short time, U.S. special operations forces went into the area in 2002 and 2003, when secret Army Delta Force and Navy SEALs worked with Pakistani security forces.

That effort was halted under Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who recently blamed Pakistan for opposing the joint operations. Mr. Armitage, however, also disclosed his diplomatic opposition to the commando operations. Mr. Armitage, an adviser to Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain, told the New York Times last month that the United States feared pressuring Pakistani leaders for commando access and that the Delta Force and SEALs in the tribal region were “pushing them almost to the breaking point” …

Another major setback for aggressive special operations activities occurred recently with a decision to downgrade the U.S. Special Operations Command. Under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the command in 2004 began to shift its focus from support and training to becoming a front-line command in the covert war to capture and kill terrorists. In May, SOCOM, as the command is called, reverted to its previous coordination and training role, a change that also frustrated many SOF commandos.

Critics in the Pentagon of the failure to more aggressively use the 50,000-strong SOF force say it also is the result of a bias by intelligence officials against special forces, including Pentagon policy-makers such as former CIA officer Michael Vickers, currently assistant defense secretary for special operations; former CIA officer Mary Beth Long, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs; and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former CIA director.

There’s more at the link, but the gist of the argument is captured above.  More than a little daydreaming of daring-do invades this notion of the use of special operations to perform the hard activities.  It’s a nice notion, this dream of more training in explosives, airborne qualifications and language making soldiers into supermen and capable of leaping borders and mountains in a single stride, but the fact is that the Pashtun are opposed to the global war on terror, and upon questioning, it has now been learned that the majority of Pakistani soldiers in the NWFP are in favor of the Taliban and believe that they are in a wrong war with them.

The Pakistanis don’t want combination bases with U.S., be they special operations or otherwise.  Any known special operations presence inside the tribal region would be an open invitation to mortar fire and the unnecessary death of all of the special operators caught without the proper force protection, and this — very soon after discovery.

The Small Wars Manual makes no mention of the use of special or black operations (although it does incorporate the use of distributed operations with as small as squad-size units connected to larger forces), but focuses more on known presence and contact with both the population and the enemy, as the Marines have done in the Helmand Province.

The reflexive turning to black operations and surreptitious engagements to remove high value targets is an artifact of the failed Rumsfeld paradigm for Afghanistan.  High value targets, according to the Small Wars Manual which makes little mention of such a thing, are not so high value after all.

The proper use of special operators has to do with the conduct of operations and operations support which requires different and specialized training (such as language, airborne qualifications, training of indigenous fighters, reconnaissance, and so forth).  There is no replacement for the conduct of counterinsurgency, not even special operations.  Afghanistan is the place to start for the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban.  After Pakistan senses commitment to the campaign, their disposition towards U.S. troops on Pakistani soil will change.