Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

The men and women of the U.S. military and intelligence services are the most important part of America’s defense capital. When they enter the service of their choice they are well aware of the implicit contract between the nation and themselves. In return for their career, America has the right to call on them to go into harm’s way, very often at the risk of their lives. I have never known a Marine, a soldier or a CIA officer who did not accept this reality, and I have never known one who balked when called on to deploy. That said, each I have known — and I suppose all — hope that if defending America costs his or her life, the cause for which it is spent is clear and worthwhile. It is precisely on this point that the U.S. government’s executive and legislative branches are lethally failing these men and women.

The events of the past three weeks throw into sharp relief that we are sending our young men and women overseas to fight an enemy that does not exist. Among the first thoughts expressed by President Obama after the near-miss al Qaeda attack on Christmas — and then echoed by his lieutenants, various members of both parties in Congress, and numerous pundits — was that the young Nigerian bomber hated our way of life. And since seven CIA officers in Afghanistan were killed by al Qaeda on Dec. 30, the same thought has been expressed by the same people.

This central thought has been accompanied by additional assertions, among which are the attackers were nihilistic Muslim fanatics and the attackers’ motivation has nothing to do with Islam. The sum and substance of the U.S. bipartisan political elite’s response to recent events has been — as it has been since 1996 when Osama bin Laden declared war on America — that the Islamist terrorists hate us for who we are and how we live, not for what we do.

This contention is a fantasy. It is fair to say that all the U.S. Marines, soldiers and CIA officers who have died in Afghanistan since 9/11 and in Iraq since Saddam’s removal have died fighting an enemy that does not exist. In numbers now approaching 6,000, these men and women have bravely fought and died in combat against an enemy whose main motivation U.S. political leaders have consistently denied. No U.S. soldier, Marine, or CIA officer has been killed by an Islamist fighter who took the field because America has women in the workplace, beer is available in ample supply, and there are early presidential primaries in Iowa every fourth year. Indeed, Islamists motivated by such issues would not rise to the level of a lethal nuisance; they certainly could not stymie the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The young Nigerian in Detroit and the Jordanian bomber in Khost and his wife have told America’s Marines, soldiers, and CIA officers what they already surely sense, but what their political leaders deny. Both attackers cited motivations that pivot on U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians; U.S. occupation of Muslim lands; and U.S. attacks on their fellow Muslims. The three individuals’ words echo the components of U.S. foreign policy named by bin Laden in 1996 as the causes of war — which also include U.S. support for Arab tyrants and exploitation of Muslim energy resources — and which polls show 80 percent of the world’s Muslims identify as attacks on their faith.

While it is hard for Americans to hear, we are at war with a steadily growing number of young men and women in the Muslim world because of what the U.S. government has done in that arena since 1945. The current slate of U.S. foreign policies toward the Islamic world generates the basic and most compelling and uniting motivation for our Islamist enemies.

Should some of these policies be changed? I surely think so, but that is a discussion for another time and broad public debate, perhaps during the 2010 midterm elections. For now, the discussion must focus on our enemies’ motivation and the knowing failure of U.S. leaders in both parties to be honest with our fighting forces. If we fail to understand that motivation, America cannot shape a war-fighting strategy to either defend those policies or defeat the tenacious, talented, religiously motivated, and growing foe our soldiers, Marines, and CIA officers are now losing to in the field. Those men and women — and their parents, spouses and children — deserve to know they are risking their lives to defeat a skilled and enduring enemy, one who is motivated by the impact of U.S. policies, and one that genuinely threatens America. They are not fighting the cartoon-like foe described by their political leaders for the past 15 years.

In his less-than-fifteen-minute, 28 December statement on the Detroit airliner attack and Iran, President Obama exhilarated America’s Islamist foes and neatly encapsulated the U.S. governing elite’s absolute inability to see that its full-bore interventionism is leading America to ruin.

In his response to the al-Qaeda attack in Detroit, Obama echoed the identical analytic path blazed by his fellow interventionists George W. Bush and Bill Clinton:

• The would-be bomber was a lone, extremist Muslim who was acting outside the tenets of his Islamic faith — the religion of peace — and was intent on slaughtering the innocent.
• We — with our allies — will track down the bomber’s colleagues wherever they are and bring them to justice.
• We will do the tracking-down gently so as not to undermine our most deeply held values. (And instead of being an adult and quietly firing those who failed to stop the Detroit attacker, I will blame my subordinates, publicly humiliate U.S. intelligence services, terrorize Americans by alleging “catastrophic” and “systemic” failure, and publicly detail the holes in our security system.)

Obama’s prescription for defeating al-Qaeda and like-minded groups maintains continuity with the failed and stubbornly ignorant approach Washington has adhered to since bin Laden declared war on the United States in August, 1996. (Yes, August 1996 — we have been unsuccessfully fighting this enemy for 13.5 years.) If the history of America’s al-Qaeda-fight proves anything, it is that

• Al-Qaeda-ism is not outside the parameters of the Islamic faith. While not mainstream, the religious justification for fighting U.S. interventionism in the Islamic world is growing in acceptance among the 80 percent of the world’s Muslims who deem U.S. foreign policy an attack on their faith. In addition, bin Laden’s jihad has an extraordinarily strong positive resonance among always historically minded Muslims. Al-Qaeda’s victories remind them of battles fought by the Prophet and Saladin which produced miraculous victories over far more powerful enemies — like a barely trained kid from Nigeria beating the greatest power the world has ever seen.
• An obviously failing fight that is now approaching 14-year duration ought to be irrefutable evidence that Clinton’s law-and-order-based strategy — even with Bush’s spasms of vigorously applied military power — has not a prayer of succeeding.
• Whether we do our tracking/arresting/killing ethically or brutally is irrelevant. Each al-Qaeda attack on the United States — successful or not — strengthens the hands of those politicians and bureaucrats who will curtail the civil liberties of Americans. The next successful al-Qaeda attack in the United States — because the U.S. military has no telling enemy targets left overseas — will yield civil-rights curtailments that will make President Bush look like Clarence Darrow.

Besides flogging this dog-eared and bankrupt response to al-Qaeda, Obama likewise followed his predecessors’ refusal to explain our Islamist enemies’ motivation to Americans. This failure is completely attributable to the fact that Obama has aligned himself fully the Bush-Clinton-Bush legacy of interventionism in the Muslim world.

• By bowing to the Saudi king, accepting the jailer Mubarak’s hospitality, putting U.S. arms at the disposal of the dictator of Yemen (where, by the way, Senator Lieberman is panting for another U.S.-waged war to defend Israel), Obama has reinforced Muslim perceptions that America wants them governed by tyrannical police states that will keep oil flowing to the west.
• By making an IDF veteran his chief of staff, acquiescing to Israeli settlement expansion, and authorizing billions more in arms for Israel, Obama is convincing Muslims he intends to keep warbling that old American standard: “Israel, Israel Uber Alles.”
• By augmenting the U.S. military force in Afghanistan — in numbers sufficient to tread water and bleed but not to win — and sending the first new forces to southern Afghanistan where al-Qaeda forces are minimal, Obama has reinforced both the general Muslim belief that U.S. policy is meant to destroy Islam, not al-Qaeda, and bin Laden’s certainty that the U.S. military is a paper tiger.

Then there is Iran. Listening to Obama as he spoke gave the impression that he was eager to get the Detroit-attack stuff out of the way so he could rhetorically intervene in Iran’s internal affairs. Joining with our allies — read other Western interventionists and pawns of Israel — Obama said he wanted to condemn the Tehran regime’s at-times-lethal crackdown on opposition demonstrators. He said that Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics were trampling on the “universal rights” of Iranians, and that such actions must stop. There are, of course, no universal political rights; this idea is the pipedream of Western secular intellectuals and interventionists, and is part and parcel of the interventionist nonsense Obama included in his Nobel speech about the “perfectibility” of the human condition through the efforts of “enlightened” men and women.

Obama’s mind is emerging as a mind filled with war-causing secular theology of the French Revolution. That revolution was all about enlightened leaders “perfecting” the common man for what the revolutionary elite deemed to be his own good, and using the vehicles of government edict, fanatic secularism, and force to do so. (Sounds a bit like the universal health-care plan, doesn’t it?) The French Revolution went on to father Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and other mass-murdering regimes. In the American context, the revolution’s impact has been the slow but increasingly complete replacement of the Founders’ sturdy non-interventionism — which recognized the pivotal and necessary role religion plays in all polities — by our current bipartisan elite’s obsession with interfering in other peoples’ internal affairs, especially if those internal affairs are interwoven with religion. For Obama and most members of our governing elite, today’s Iran fairly screams for Western intervention to break the mullahs’ backs and install secularism; to destroy an Israeli foe and ensure AIPAC funds to continue to flow into their pockets; and to make them feel good about themselves, no matter the cost to Americans and their children.

In a statement of less than a quarter-hour, then, Obama demonstrated how thoroughly he slicked Americans in the last presidential election. The “hope” he offered turns out to be not less but more war-causing interventionism framed by a secularist “moral compass” alien to most non-elite Americans; the “Yes we can” slogan has proven to refer to making Obama’s Washington the agent of forced Westernization from the Congo to Afghanistan, and from Burma to Iran; and the president’s much-touted “audacity” seems nothing more than Obama’s brass in continuing to reassuringly chant the Bush-Clinton-Bush lie to Americans that Islamists attack us because of our way of life not because of our interventionism.

And thus is how a great Republic is being ruined by the littlest of arrogant and willful men.

Published: Antiwar.com

• The go-light strategy in Afghanistan is a joke. If Obama’s serious about victory, it’s time to start making unpleasant choices.

One has to admire the ingenuity of the policymakers, journalists, and generals who are desperately seeking to avoid hard decisions on what to do about America’s lost war in Afghanistan. Last spring, the Barack Obama administration, Republican leaders, and senior U.S. generals signed on to the fairy-tale prescription spun by David Kilcullen in his book The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen argued that only limited numbers of Afghans were dedicated insurgents and that the great bulk of the United States’ enemies in Afghanistan were either hired by the Taliban or intimidated by Takfiri Islamists. Based on this comprehensive surmise — for which there is scant evidence — this April’s strategy was to “protect” Afghans from bad guys and give jobs to those waging war for wages. Having attained these goals, the strategy held, cleaning up the unpopular Takfiris would be — like Iraq — a cakewalk.

Guess what? No cakewalk. Now, Americans are watching a shellshocked Obama administration trying to decide what to do about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s urgent request for 40,000-45,000 additional U.S. troops. The general’s request, of course, is an emergency SOS indicating that the U.S.-NATO coalition is close to losing the Afghan war; a four-star U.S. general does not ask for a near doubling of his force to smooth out minor problems.

Thus, not only did the April strategy utterly fail, but the Taliban-led insurgency’s trend line is steadily climbing upward, an ascent that began in 2007 and would not be possible without widespread and increasing popular support. Rather than popular support for the Taliban being based on intimidation and money, what we are seeing in Afghanistan is popular opinion catching up with Islamist determination. Until roughly late 2006, the war against the U.S.-NATO coalition was largely fought by the Taliban, other Islamists groups like that led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and al Qaeda. Since then, however, the Islamists have been joined by Afghans who simply do not want Muslim Afghanistan occupied by all sorts of infidels from all sorts of Christian and polytheist countries. In short, an Islamist insurgency has evolved into an Islamist-nationalist freedom struggle not unlike that which beat the Red Army. The best way to see the growth of the Afghan enemy facing the United States and NATO is to track the proliferating number of insurgent attacks in the heretofore quiet and supposedly “friendly” arc of provinces from Herat in the west clockwise to Badakhshan in the far northeast.

Team Obama faces quite a dilemma. McChrystal’s plan to stave off defeat by asking for substantial immediate reinforcements — a request that is still far short of what is needed to “win” in Afghanistan — is a sure sign that long-term intense fighting and high casualties lie ahead. The United States’ latest Nobel Prize winner now has a choice: He must act quickly on the advice of McChrystal and the U.S. intelligence community to save a marooned U.S. Army, or dither behind the harebrained split-al-Qaeda-from-the-Taliban strategizing and let more overmatched U.S. soldiers and Marines die amid the ego-building praise of effete Americans, pacifist NGOs, and the Nobelistas.

For now, dithering seems to be on tap. Last week unnamed administration officials and some commentators began floating a new “strategy” based on the formulation that: (a) the Taliban and al Qaeda are separable; (b) the Taliban does not pose a direct threat to the United States; and, therefore, (c) U.S. forces should fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Well, simply put, this strategy makes Kilcullen look like Clausewitz and surely could not have been vetted by the U.S. intelligence community. On point “a,” it is no news at all that the Taliban and al Qaeda are separate entities; they always have been and will be. What is important is that they are working in tandem toward the same clear and simple primary goal — to drive out the United States and NATO, destroy Karzai’s corrupt and incompetent regime, and re-establish their Islamist emirate. In working toward this goal, al Qaeda’s combat role in Afghanistan has decreased as mujahideen forces — Afghans, Iraq veterans, and other foreign volunteers — have grown and become better armed, trained, and funded. This should have been apparent to U.S. officials several years ago when Osama bin Laden named Mustafa Abu al-Yazid as al Qaeda’s Afghan commander. Yazid’s long-practiced fortes are logistics and finance, and he is now running the main components of al Qaeda’s changed but still essential Afghan effort: logistics and training, intelligence collection, and media operations. (Nota bene: This is nowhere near a full commitment of al Qaeda’s resources, and its remaining assets are assisting other insurgencies — such as in Somalia, Algeria, and Yemen — and preparing coming attacks in the United States and Europe.)

On point “b,” one has to wonder what can be meant by arguing that the Taliban does not pose a “direct threat” to the United States. Did the drafters of the new strategy bother to ask the intelligence community whom the United States is fighting in Afghanistan? The Taliban and its allies are unquestionably a direct threat to deployed U.S. military forces — ask the commander of the U.S. post at Kamdesh, Nuristan, mauled on Oct. 4 — and they intend to prevent everything Washington cites as a goal in Afghanistan: democracy, secularism, the rule of (Western) law, elections, constitutions, central government institutions, women’s rights, coeducational schools, and the annihilation of al Qaeda. By protecting al Qaeda, incidentally, Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s outfit is also facilitating a “direct threat” to the continental United States.

It is time to face the facts. The Taliban and its allies have waged an eight-year insurgency against the United States, NATO, and the Afghan government that is growing in geographical reach, battlefield success, and popularity in the Muslim world. As long as U.S. forces are in Afghanistan, this reality will remain the same. The only way to create a less threatening Taliban is for the Obama administration to admit defeat and turn over Afghanistan to Mullah Omar, knowing that he will allow bin Laden and al Qaeda to stay in place and that U.S. defeat will have an enormous galvanizing impact on the Islamist movement around the world.

Point “c” is another mystifier and one that the intelligence community was forced to unsuccessfully pursue by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. One must assume Obama and his advisors will not abjectly surrender in Afghanistan, at least not before the 2010 midterm elections. Based on this assumption, the idea of focusing U.S. forces on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan raises the question of who will fight the still raging Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan while the United States shoots in the dark at al Qaeda targets it cannot locate? The Brits and the Canadians? Massively reinforced NATO contingents? The Afghan National Army and police? India? Not bloody likely. Unless the United States is going to do its al Qaeda hunting Clinton-style from U.S. Navy carriers and submarines and/or Saudi, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti bases — and thereby be even less successful than it is now — U.S. forces are unavoidably going to do the bulk of the fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan while simultaneously hunting al Qaeda.

For the sake of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, let us hope this new strategic formulation is quickly dropped and forgotten and that Washington’s focus is refixed on the hard but simple Afghan choice it faces: Because the U.S.-NATO occupation powers the Afghan insurgency and international Muslim support for it, we must either destroy it root and branch or leave. This issue merits debate, but that must wait until McChrystal gets the troops needed to delay defeat. Afterward, only the all-out use of large, conventional U.S. military forces can be expected to have a shot at winning in Afghanistan. Since 1996, the United States has definitively proven that clandestine operations, covert action, Special Forces actions, and aerial drone attacks cannot defeat al Qaeda. It has likewise proven beyond doubt that nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand.

That said, military victory would require 400,000 to 500,000 additional troops, the wide use of land mines (even if Princess Diana spins in her grave), and the killing of the enemy and its civilian supporters in the numbers needed to make them admit the game is not worth the candle. This clearly is not a viable option. We do not have enough troops, and U.S. political leaders, many U.S. generals, and the anti-American academy and media do not think “military victory” is an appropriate or moral goal; their mantra is: “Better dead Americans at home and abroad than criticism from Europe, the media, and the academy.”

Overall, then, we are well along the road to self-imposed defeat in Afghanistan, and about the best we can do is give McChrystal the troops he needs to slow defeat. After doing that, we can figure out how to get out of Afghanistan in an orderly manner, while preparing to absorb more al Qaeda attacks in North America.

How many Marines and soldiers will die in Afghanistan before the mainstream media dares to speak the truth and ask questions based thereon? Yes, it is the mainstream media that is keeping us locked in Afghanistan, and they are doing so for two reasons:

1. They will do almost anything to avoid asking President Obama a hard question that would delineate the depth of his deceit.
2. They now support the Afghan war because it is not the children of the elite who are dying and because it is now being fought for social policy reasons — women’s rights, educating children, etc. — and not for any reason that pertains to America’s defense or future security.

Let’s start with a basic contention: America has lost the war in Afghanistan, and any further U.S. casualties are useless. How to test this contention? The following questions put to the president or his chief advisers on terrorism and Afghanistan — John Brennan and Bruce Riedel — would help to clarify the situation for all Americans. If any of these three men answer honestly, we will be out of Afghanistan in 90 days.

• Isn’t a clear sign of sheer military and political incompetence in your administration and that of former president Bush that we are approaching the ninth winter of the Afghan war and no one in the Pentagon or either party is sure how many troops are needed or what they are to do there — kill the enemy, rebuild the country, or secularize and democratize Muslims?
• While you continually try to frighten the American people by saying Pakistan is in a state of near-collapse, isn’t the case that the most dire threat to Pakistan’s stability is the prolonged U.S. and NATO occupation of Afghanistan? Is it not true, moreover, that the Afghan war and the civil war Washington is urging Islamabad to wage in its border lands are destroying nuclear-armed Pakistan as a viable nation-state?
• Why are you supporting President Karzai, his family, and his advisers, people who have purchased this week’s election with U.S. funds; who are unable to travel safely, let alone govern, outside of Kabul; who are raking in an untold fortune from the heroin industry; and who are hated by growing numbers of Afghans because they have seen no impact from the billions of dollars in the foreign aid given to Karzai’s regime for reconstruction?
• Shouldn’t you tell Americans that you and the Bush administration have tried to pull the wool over their eyes by claiming that this week’s election — or any election in Afghanistan — will improve stability there, even though you know that national elections are meaningless in that deeply Islamic and tribal society? Isn’t it true that elections work only if the opposition puts away its guns after they lose the vote, and that the Taliban and their allies — funded and egged on by the Saudis and other Gulf regimes — will never do that?
• Doesn’t the deployment of new U.S. troops to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan show three things: (1) that NATO is losing the war in that region and needs substantial assistance; (2) that the deployment means the one task of national-security importance to the United States — destroying al-Qaeda — is not being addressed because there are virtually no al-Qaeda forces in southern Afghanistan; and (3) that you are unconcerned about further alienating the Islamic world by demonstrating in Afghanistan that you are waging war against Muslims who want to live by Islamic law, not against al-Qaeda?
• Doesn’t the decision made by the Bush administration, and recently reaffirmed by Secretary of State Clinton, to support the Karzai regime’s decision to facilitate the greatly expanded presence of India — Pakistan’s mortal, nuclear-armed enemy — in Afghanistan all but negate Pakistan’s willingness to help the U.S. in Afghanistan? Haven’t Karzai and Washington created a situation where, for the first time in its history, Pakistan faces an Indian threat on both its eastern and western borders? And doesn’t this reality make it essential, for the sake of Pakistan’s national security, that Pakistan’s army work to dislodge India’s presence in Afghanistan by making sure the Afghan Taliban eventually prevails?
• Why don’t you tell American parents that the lives of their soldier-children are of secondary importance — if that — to your goal of building an Afghanistan in America’s image? Isn’t it right to tell those parents that your and the Pentagon’s decision to tighten the rules of engagement for our soldiers and Marines to avoid Afghan civilian casualties will yield more U.S. deaths and afford safer battlefield conditions for the Taliban and their allies?
• Wouldn’t it be wise to tell Americans that decisions by your administration and its predecessor have knowingly created the potential for a military disaster for the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan? Don’t the American people have the right to know that U.S. politicians and generals have deliberately marooned a U.S. field army in Afghanistan by allowing its support to depend on tenuous overland supply lines that run through hostile territory — the Russian Federation and Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal territory?

These are fairly direct questions and have the benefit of being framed on the basis of reality on the ground in Afghanistan, not on what Patrick Henry once called the phantom delusion of hope and others have called the audacity of hope. One cannot be sanguine that the mainstream media will ask any of these questions, or, if asked, that any of the gentlemen named above will answer honestly. Indeed, it is much more likely that the mainstream media and senior administration officials will identify this week’s Potemkin Afghan election as a success and rejoice at what they will call the advance of democracy in that beleaguered land. And thereafter? Well, my guess is that many more of America’s soldiers and Marines will die uselessly for the unobtainable and nonessential goal of making sure Ms. Muhammad can sit in the Afghan parliament.

Published: Antiwar.com

I guess I would say that the Taliban are in the lead, but that overall the Muslim Afghan people are — as always — winning against foreign Christian-Pagan occupiers. As long as we are in Afghanistan to nation-build and “protect Afghans,” we are losing. As long as we are senseless enough to deem all those who fight us as “takfiris” — the most extreme of religious Muslims — we are losing. As long as we are led by generals who prefer “shielding Afghans” at the cost of dead soldiers and Marines, we are losing. As long as we continue to permit the Indians to keep increasing their presence in Afghanistan, we are losing. As long as we are encouraging Asif Ali Zadari and the Pakistani Army to worsen the civil war in their country, we are losing. As long as we continue trying to build a strong central government in Kabul, we are losing. As long as we are supporting the corrupt and incompetent Hamid Karzai and his family, we are losing. As long as we are to afraid to deal harshly with the Saudis and other Gulf states that are funneling aid to the Taliban, we are losing. As long as the resupply lines for our soldiers and Marines run through enemy territory in the Pakistani tribal zone and the Russian Federation, we are losing. As long as we believe that any number of elections in Afghanistan will ever make a difference, we are losing. As long as we believe we have as much time as we need to get our act together in Afghanistan, we are losing.

As is the custom of American interventionists, President Obama spoke in Cairo as if our Islamist enemies have no vote in how their conflict with the United States will henceforth proceed. The adolescent geniuses who wrote Obama’s speech apparently spent no time at all perusing what Osama bin Laden and other Islamists have said or written over the past 13 years, and especially since 2001. At repeated points in that corpus of material, for example, bin Laden has offered a truce to the United States and its allies on terms eerily similar to those Obama described in Cairo as the intentions of his administration.

• Complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
• No residual U.S. military bases in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
• Self-determination for Muslim peoples now ruled by tyrants.
• Termination of Israel’s gradual but unending thievery of Palestinian territory.
• U.S. and Western recognition that all Muslims belong to one nation, or ummah, and that the post-World War I subdivision of the ummah into nation-states is a Western-imposed contrivance for subjugating Muslims.

Now let us be clear. Obama’s Cairo positions are not optimal for bin Laden; they leave untouched, for example, such core demands as the removal of the U.S. military and civilian presence from the Arabian Peninsula and annihilation of the state of Israel. Still, the president’s stated intentions give al-Qaeda’s leadership not just food for thought, but also perhaps an opportunity to allow ordinary Muslims to judge for themselves whether the president’s offer of a “partnership” with Islam will be matched with deeds, or whether it is just more noxious Wilsonian piety covering the standard U.S. interventionist agenda.

In the weeks ahead, then, it is possible that the White House will hear directly from Osama bin Laden and find that the al-Qaeda chief has posed a formidable problem for Obama and his band of Islam-ignorant advisers, as well as for our interventionist elite generally. If so, bin Laden’s statement might run something like the following:

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.

Having studied President Obama’s speech in the Mubarak-controlled prison for Muslims that is called Egypt, we retain serious doubts about the seriousness and honesty of his words. But the Prophet Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, has not only instructed Muslims to fight against those who oppress them and attack their faith, but has told Muslims to incline toward peace if their enemies appear to be so inclined. Therefore, because Muhammad, the best of mankind, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, requires us to give the foe the benefit of the doubt, we today offer President Obama a long truce and require from him only that which he so clearly promised in Cairo.

We first thank God that Obama sees that, with God’s help, the mujahideen — may God be pleased with them — have defeated U.S.-led Crusader forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and that their full withdrawal is essential. We also praise God for Obama’s pledge to leave behind no U.S. bases in either country, a promise verifying that America did not need to invade either in self-defense, and did so only because Bush and his Zionist advisers wanted to kill Muslims, destroy their religion, occupy their holy places, and rob their territory.

Obama likewise pledged to stop the Zionist-Crusader theft of more territory from the oppressed and persecuted Palestinian people, may God shield them. All Muslims know that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are merely a prelude to the Zionists’ goal of destroying all Palestinians and taking all their land. Muslims know too that only two things can stop this catastrophe: Obama must order Israel — a state that exists only because of U.S. power — to dismantle the settlements, or, with God’s aid, the mujahideen must wage jihad on the U.S. and Israeli murderers until all Palestine, from the river to the sea, is restored to Islam.

Also at Cairo, Obama plainly admitted what we and other believers have long argued, and what God has ordained; namely, that all the world’s Muslims belong to one Islamic nation and that the separate nation-states into which the West divided Muslims are illegitimate and governed by tyrants, against whom Muslims — like all other peoples — have the right to battle until self-determination is achieved.

Because of Obama’s words and, more important, because of our prophet’s instructions, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him, to incline toward peace if the enemy so inclines, we hereby offer a truce that will end attacks on America and its interests if Obama matches his peaceful words with peaceful deeds — as God has demanded. For this truce with the United States, we ask only that Obama fulfill the three pledges he made voluntarily in Cairo by the first day of 2010:

• By completely withdrawing U.S. and Western forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and dismantling and destroying all military bases and diplomatic facilities in those countries.
• By ordering Israel to cease the construction of settlements in the West Bank; by forcing it to dismantle and destroy those already built; and by providing before-and-after videotapes and satellite photos proving the efforts were successful.
• By ending all economic aid and military protection for the tyrant rulers who are oppressing and torturing Muslims. We do not ask Washington to remove the tyrants; the mujahideen — with God’s permission — will tend to them after the Americans are gone.

O, my fellow Muslims, in God’s name please watch closely for Obama’s response to this fair offer of ours. Abiding by our prophet’s guidance, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, we have made it easy for the Americans to take a giant step toward peace and to end much of their war on Islam. We in the al-Qaeda organization and you around the ummah can now judge how far Obama’s promises can be trusted. He has only to do what he has pledged to do, and may God help him do so. But if Obama fails, we in al-Qaeda and all Muslims will know that he is no different than Bush, except that he uses honeyed rather than hateful worlds, and that jihad in God’s path is the only means of victory.

My closing prayer is that all praise is due to Allah, Lord of both worlds, and may His peace and prayers be upon our master Muhammad and upon his family and companions.

With such words, Osama bin Laden could provide a useful service for both Muslims and Americans by forcing Obama and his talk-softly interventionists to either fish or cut bait. Not since the ever lamentable Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech has an American president provided the enemy a scorecard on which his veracity can be quantified. Once the Great War ended, of course, the hypocrite Wilson abandoned the Fourteen Points as fast as possible, and because German power had collapsed, he paid no price for lying. President Obama has no chance for such good fortune. If he fails to deliver on his Cairo promises, America will confront an undefeated and growing Islamist enemy that will have on its side tens of millions more Muslims who have decided for themselves that Obama cannot be trusted and that U.S. intervention can only be stopped by jihad.

Published: Antiwar.com

In just over 100 days, President Obama is on the verge of ensuring that militant Islam’s war on America will be waged for decades to come and its forces will never suffer manpower or money shortages. How did he accomplish so much in some little time? He simply behaved as all U.S. political leaders behave; that is, as an ignorant and arrogant interventionist.

Let us take the ignorant part first. Since Jan. 20, Obama and his band of Israel-Firsters have shown the Muslim world — moderate, conservative, radical, and fanatic — that George W. Bush was no one-off fluke, that Democrats intend to wage war on Islam just like the Republicans. How so? Well, look at Obama’s decisions and actions. They can only be explained by accepting that the new president is ignorant of our Islamist foes, either by choice or because the ability to read is not required to graduate at Harvard.

For 13 years, Osama bin Laden, his lieutenants, their allies, and numerous anti-Islamist commentators across the Middle East have patiently, repeatedly, and explicitly explained to the bipartisan U.S. governing elite and its media and academic acolytes that the Islamists attacking America do not give a tinker’s damn about its lifestyle, liberties, freedoms, or elections. Orally and in print, U.S. leaders have been told what motivates the Islamists’ war on America is the U.S. government’s foreign policies in the Muslim world. Foremost among these are U.S. support for Muslim tyrannies, the U.S. military’s presence in Muslim lands, and unqualified U.S. support for Israel.

And what have Obama and his advisers done with this excellent intelligence about enemy motivation, which, by the way, comes straight from the horse’s mouth? Well, they clearly ignored it, and by deciding to operate in an intelligence-free environment Obama has acted in a way that will intensify and prolong the Islamists’ war against the United States. How so?

• On the tyranny front, Obama chose to go to Turkey for his first visit to the Muslim world. That country is formally governed by an Islamic party, but it is actually ruled by a thoroughly Westernized general staff ready to pounce on and dismantle the Islamic regime if its gets too religiously ambitious. Needless to say, Turkey is regarded by many Muslims as having long ago sold its Islamic soul by joining the “Christian” NATO alliance.
• Obama then proceeded to acknowledge America’s oil vassalage to Saudi Arabia when, on being introduced, he bowed to Saudi King Abdullah, the master of the Saudi police state. The president also chose to speak his first televised words to Muslims in an interview on al-Arabiya television, the mouthpiece of the Saudi tyranny.
• Obama next said that he will go to Egypt to address Muslims in a speech he promised during the presidential campaign. This visit will show Obama prating about the glories of secular democracy and the peacefulness of Islam while standing cheek-by-jowl with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, chief warden of the Muslim world’s premier police state.
• On the military side, Obama has announced plans to send 21,000 more U.S. troops to what Muslims call “the defiant land of jihad, Afghanistan.” The arrival of those troops — too few to win but enough to slow our defeat — will be portrayed by al-Jazeera, the BBC, and especially the Saudis’ anti-American shills at al-Arabiya as a brutal re-invasion of Afghanistan.
• Obama was silent while Israel invaded and wrecked Gaza last winter; has appointed an IDF veteran as his chief of staff — think of the espionage potential in that move; has watched the proliferation of Israeli settlements; and has re-imposed sanctions on Syria and kept war with Iran on the front burner. His Justice Department has also exempted from prosecution Israel-First Americans and their agents in the Congress.

Like former president Bush, then, Obama has kept himself ignorant of the Islamists’ motivation and is playing directly into their hands; indeed, bin Laden, with all his road-building skills, could not pave a smoother path to hell for America. In taking this tack, Obama also displays the abiding arrogance that permeates our governing elite, an attitude that causes them to believe that both Muslims and Americans are stupid. If you doubt this, listen to the sophomoric words of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as he tries to make sure that no one looks behind the curtain of Mubarak’s tyranny when Obama speaks in Egypt:

“[T]his isn’t a speech to leaders. This is a speech to many, many people and a continuing effort by this president and this White House to demonstrate how we can work together to ensure the safety and security and the future well-being through hope and opportunity of the children of this country and of the Muslim world.”

Well, Mr. Gibbs, as one of Obama’s predecessors once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Elected on a pledge to end Bush’s wars, Obama has instead ensured their extension by actions sure to further inflame Islamists and, indeed, most Muslims governed by royal, military, or elected-for-life tyrants. As it becomes clear that Obama’s administration is miring America deeper in a war with Islam that benefits only Israel, he and his advisers will repeat the mantra long intoned by Israeli politicians: “We tried our best to better relations with Islam, but we were rebuffed and so now Americans must soldier on in endless wars.” This will be a lie. Obama may use softer rhetoric, but he is loyal to the status quo interventionism Washington practices no matter which party holds power.

The only redeeming aspect of Obama’s 100-plus-day foreign-policy debacle is that his deceit is about played out. He will fool no Muslims. His courting of Westernized Turkish generals, bowing to King Abdullah, and joining Mubarak in a cheer for freedom will tell Muslims all they need to know about U.S. intentions in their region. Likewise, Obama’s expanding war in Afghanistan and his kowtowing to Israel and American Israel-Firsters will give the lie to his claim that Washington is now an honest broker in the Middle East.

Americans will be slower off the mark than Muslims, but they will soon see that Democrats share the Republicans’ eagerness to wage unnecessary wars at the cost of their children and taxes. The inevitable need for more troops and money to stave off U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, the increased Islamist attacks on U.S. interests at home and abroad, and — most of all — the unraveling of “success” in Iraq (which, in turn, will prevent a U.S. withdrawal that would be lethal to Israel) will be seen by Americans for what they are: the price of an ignorant, arrogant interventionism that is ruining not only America’s economy and domestic cohesion, but their kids’ future prosperity and security. At this point, a long overdue foreign-policy debate can begin. It will give Americans a last chance to realign the republic’s foreign policy with the tenets of Washington’s Farewell Address and, in so doing, forever break the corrupting power of the Israel-Firsters, individuals who Washington uncannily described in 1796 as “ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens … [who] betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country.”

Pray to God this occurs before a cynical, racist Benjamin Netanyahu presents Obama with a fait accompli that drags 300 million Americans into Israel’s war against Iran.

Published: Antiwar.com

With much ballyhooing, Bruce Riedel led a team that conducted the Obama administration’s “review” of Afghan policy. As is known, the team’s deliberations produced a wonder of either naiveté or stupidity, or perhaps both: 21,000 more U.S. troops to control a country the size of Texas, and a logistical system running vital U.S.-NATO resupply lines through hostile territory in Pakistan and — with Russia’s gleeful support for keeping America bleeding in Afghanistan — the Commonwealth of Independent States. The question must be asked how a man as intelligent as Riedel came up with a plan that amounts to massively reinforcing failure.

The answer lies, I fear, in Riedel’s eagerness to please Obama with a new plan and a deep faith in the rightness of U.S. interventionism. Trying to please the president is a trait so common in some former senior CIA officials jockeying for political sinecures that it hardly comes as a surprise; Riedel very effectively managed analysis on several Middle East issues during his Agency career.

What does surprise me, however, is Riedel’s clear ignorance of his Obama-assigned task, Afghanistan. Writing on the Brookings Institution Web site on April 30, 2009, Riedel bemoans the fact that America has not intervened more fully and aggressively in Afghanistan. In an article titled “Afghanistan: What Is at Stake?” Riedel writes,

“Twice in the last quarter century the United States has squandered great victories achieved in Afghanistan by failing to follow up battlefield success with an enduring and resourced commitment to helping to build a stable government in Afghanistan.”

One wonders what Riedel is talking about. The United States has never won a war in Afghanistan. The war against the Red Army and the Afghan communists (1979-1992) was won by the Afghans — period. U.S. arms supplies helped them kill Russians more quickly and effectively, but they, not we, won the war. In the war that commenced in October 2001, we won one battle — that for control of the Afghan cities — but since late March 2002, we have been losing every step of the way. To his credit, Riedel says we are losing the current war. He also says “it is not yet lost.” He is wrong; we have lost.

Another, more important point on which Riedel is dead wrong is in his repetition of the exceedingly durable but completely incorrect urban legend that Washington and the West abandoned Afghanistan after the Red Army withdrew. In the late 1980s, Riedel claims,

“U.S.-supported Afghan mujahideen defeated the Soviet 40th Red Army [sic]. … The mujahideen were badly divided, however, and quickly fell into civil war. The United States could have led an international effort to restore order and rallied key players like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to try to end the conflict. Instead, Afghanistan got virtually no attention from the White House or the Congress.”

Riedel’s ignorance of what happened after the Red Army’s withdrawal is almost breathtaking, but such a misrepresentation of reality is politically requisite if anyone is to believe the new-but-doomed Afghan policy approved by Obama has a chance to succeed. One might have hoped that Riedel — who worked on Iraq in the years he is writing about — would have consulted one or more of his Afghan-experienced former colleagues for some factual background before taking up his pen. But then again, the facts would get in the way of justifying more U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Riedel argues that a viable post-Soviet Afghan government failed because the “mujahideen were badly divided,” Western governments lost interest, and Washington did not seek Saudi and Pakistani involvement. This is palpable nonsense. The mujahideen were, are, and always will be “badly divided,” but they still beat the Soviet superpower — as they are on the verge of beating the American superpower — and there is no doubt they eventually would have worked out governing arrangements compatible with Afghan history and society. The West tends to forget that the Afghans have been running their country for 2,000 years and have a bit more experience than we do in managing their tribal and ethnically diverse society.

From the perspective of Washington and its allies, the real post-Soviet trouble was that whatever regime the mujahideen built would not be the one we wanted; namely, one that included none of the Afghans who actually fought and bled to drive out the Soviets. Sadly, therefore, the U.S. government, many of its European allies (especially the UK, France, and Germany), and various UN organizations intervened fully and dictatorially in post-Soviet Afghan politics, thereby preventing any sort of genuine Afghan attempt at self-determination. And as they are today, the Saudis and Pakistanis were also fully involved in telling the Afghans what to do, and, just as today, their recommendations ran exactly counter to U.S. interests.

Notwithstanding Riedel’s assertions, in the late 1980s and early 1990s U.S., Western, and UN diplomats consistently tried to dictate to the Afghans what kind of government they should have. That troika wanted to staff the new secular and centralized Kabul regime with Afghan technocrats; secular Afghans who, like Hamid Karzai, spent the war safely in India, America, or Europe; “Gucci” mujahideen who were nominally Islamic, received wartime aid, but did no fighting; and even former members of the Afghan communist regime. In other words, all were welcome to join the new Western-mandated Afghan government except those who wore beards, carried AK-47s, were devoted Islamists, and fought to expel the Soviets.

In the immediate post-Soviet years, then, Washington spent tens of millions of dollars to try to form exactly the same type of strong and centralized Afghan government — the type of regime that historically causes war in Afghanistan — it is trying to form today. And in a lethally ironic case of déjà vu, the father of current Afghan President Karzai — a far more honorable and competent man than his son — was one of the West’s favorites, and he was guided by Zalmay Khalilzad, the same U.S. diplomat who has brought us the recent disasters in Kabul and Baghdad. In addition, the talented U.S. ambassadors Robert and Phyllis Oakley and Peter Tomsen led numbers of U.S. and UK bureaucrats, contractors, and NGOs into the country to teach Afghans the West’s democratic ways, as well as how to organize and administer national budgets, establish the rule of law, and create a strong central regime. This wildly misplaced intervention went so far as to bring in teams of American lawyers and judges to teach the Afghans a Westernized judicial system to replace what we knew was all that silly old Islamic and tribal stuff.

In the end, the U.S.-led, late-1980s democracy-building intervention in Afghanistan was all for naught, just as Obama’s new Afghan policy will be. The Afghans wanted no part of the secularism the U.S.-led West insisted on then, and they want none of what the U.S.-led coalition has on offer now. While the Afghans will accept medical aid for their kids, electrical generators, and tools for increasing potable water supplies, they will utterly reject and fight measures aimed at eliminating the traditional role of tribalism and Islam in their society in the name of secular democracy. Afghans, like all Muslims, make a clear distinction between the terms modernization and Westernization; they are eager for the former but will fight the latter to the death. For our future relations with the Islamic world, it is a fatal liability that we are so cocksure the two terms are synonyms.

One final point. Riedel is a senior fellow at the aggressively pro-Israel Brookings Institution. Is it just a coincidence that his very misleading article about the “need” for more and longer U.S. intervention in Afghanistan appears just a week after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman identified Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq as the three main threats to Israel? I think not, and that is why America will either be defeated or still fighting, bleeding, and losing in Afghanistan and Iraq by Inauguration Day 2013.

Published: Antiwar.com

In surprisingly good English, the captive quietly answers: “Yes, all thanks to God, I do know when the mujahideen will, with God’s permission, detonate a nuclear weapon in the United States, and I also know how many and in which cities.” Startled, the CIA interrogators quickly demand more detail. Smiling his trademark shy smile, the captive says nothing. Reporting the interrogation’s results to the White House, the CIA director can only shrug when the president asks: “What can we do to make Osama bin Laden talk?”

Americans should keep this worst-case scenario in mind as they watch the tragicomic spectacle taking place in the wake of the publication of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos. It will help them recognize this episode of political theater as another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America’s defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush’s democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush’s worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs — rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology — a fair gist of which is “If the world likes us more we are more secure” — cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying “War on Terror” and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their “moral compass,” a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder’s identifying them as “moral cowards.” Mulling Obama’s claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Before enthroning Obama’s personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama’s hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters — should that be a concern in any event? — but they do not even make the Islamists’ hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. That list is headed by Washington’s support for Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, its presence on the Arabian Peninsula and its unqualified support for Israel. Still, Emanuel’s statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy’s true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush.

Next, the president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know — not “argue” or “contend” or “assert” but know — that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation’s defense. The integrity, intellect and reputations of Judge Michael Mukasey, Gen. Michael V. Hayden and others have now been besmirched by Obama because their realistic worldview and firsthand experience do not mesh with the president’s desire to install his personal “moral compass” as the core of U.S. foreign and defense policy. And after visiting CIA headquarters last week, the president made it clear that he rejected statements surely made by CIA officers who risked their careers to tell him how many successful covert operations against al-Qaeda have flowed from interrogation information. As with all Jacobins, Obama cannot allow a hard and often brutal reality — call it an inconvenient truth — to impinge on his view of how the world should and must be made to work.

And so as the Justice Department memos farce plays out over the coming weeks, Americans can be confident that both parties will play politics to the hilt while letting the nation’s safety take the hindmost. Obama and his team will “reluctantly” agree to a congressional investigation of former Bush officials and serving CIA officers, politically targeted indictments from Holder’s minions and perhaps even a truth commission to prove that even the United States can aspire to be a half-baked Third World country.

Republicans will welcome the Democrats’ actions as a chance to reclaim their mantle as the most reliable protectors of U.S. national security. They will seek to prove that Obama and his party are eager to persecute the men and women who defend America and will denounce Democratic actions as a “witch hunt.” Those words were used last week by Sen. John McCain, a man who seems to have forgotten that as a presidential candidate he, more than anyone, persuaded Americans that the interrogation techniques amounted to torture and gloried in calling the CIA and its officers a “rogue institution.”

Americans and their country’s security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden’s shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Michael Scheuer, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, is the author of “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.”

Published: The Washington Post

The Australian soldier and anthropologist Dr. David Kilcullen’s new book — The Accidental Guerrilla, Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford, 2009) — is receiving a good deal of attention as the manual with which the Obama administration will forge a successful conclusion to the U.S.-NATO campaign in Afghanistan. The title, The Accidental Guerrilla, refers to those locals living in an insurgent environment who pick up weapons and fight counterinsurgent forces because of tribal mores, because they like to fight, because the West has invaded, or because they are intimidated by what Kilcullen claims to be the limited number of dedicated insurgents or jihadists, in the case of Iraq, Afghanistan, or other Muslim locales. This being the case, Kilcullen argues, the U.S.-NATO goal in Afghanistan should be to split the “accidental guerrillas” away from the jihadists. Echoes of Kilcullen’s thesis can already be heard in public statements by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Afghanistan guru Bruce Reidel, and others who have claimed that up to 75 percent of the Afghan insurgents can be peeled away from the Taliban and its allies and brought over to Karzai’s regime.

Kilcullen writes well, and his book contains a great deal of vital information on the complexities and importance of tribalism in the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies, as well as some interesting but extraneous data on Islamist and other violence in East Timor, Indonesia, and southern Thailand. The Accidental Guerrilla is a book that seems sound if you read it fast, but which on reflection is a deeply flawed recipe for more and longer-lasting U.S.-led intervention that promises no permanent success.

The book is framed, unfortunately, by Kilcullen’s social scientist side. Like most social scientists who have acceded to the title of “terrorism expert” — one thinks of Fawaz Gerges and Mary Habeck, although neither is remotely in the Australian’s league — Kilcullen does not like the problem the United States confronts: an increasingly well-organized Salafi insurgency that professes an attractive ideology — especially for young Muslims — and whose influence and violence are spreading in many areas of the world. So instead of writing a book on how to deal with the reality of a growing Salafi movement, Kilcullen simply redefines the enemy into something that is less daunting, but also nonexistent. For Kilcullen, America’s Islamist foes can be defined as a relatively small number of takfiris who are enemies of Muslims and Westerners and who can be beaten once the accidental guerrillas are eliminated from the equation.

Now, if the United States were confronted by takfiris — Sunni Muslims who eagerly kill other Muslims they decide are not practicing Islam correctly — it would be in high clover. A wholly takfiri enemy would be an extremely limited body of men which would have almost no popular appeal or growth potential, given that would-be members who fall short of religious perfection would be killed. In the 1990s in Sudan, for example, takfiri gunmen twice tried to kill Osama bin Laden because he was not a “good enough Muslim.” And the only genuine strategic threat to al-Qaeda since 2001 was its own commander in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, himself a takfiri, who readily killed any Shi’ites or Sunnis who did not measure up to his religious requirements. The transitory U.S. success in Iraq’s Anbar province that Kilcullen superbly describes occurred precisely because Zarqawi’s takfiri ways caused a rebellion against al-Qaeda forces by local Sunnis, forcing al-Qaeda’s dispersal northward or into the Levant. Bin Laden sent a veteran and talented Salafi Egyptian jihadist, whose war name is Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, to take Zarqawi’s place and try to rebuild a sense of shared purpose between al-Qaeda and Iraq Sunni mujahideen. That work has been painfully slow and difficult from al-Qaeda’s perspective, but the now unraveling “success” of the surge suggests Muhajir is making some limited progress. The bottom line on this issue is that all Americans and their allies should pray for ever greater number of takfiris in the field, because a U.S.-led victory over a takfiri enemy would be as certain as a U.S.-led victory over the Salafi movement is now unthinkable.

The great bulk of The Accidental Guerrilla’s recommendations, therefore, pivot off what I believe is a wrong definition of the Islamist enemy we confront. Indeed, the author’s failure to adequately analyze the religious motivation of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their allies significantly undermines the book’s value. Kilcullen has taken a large and still growing Salafi enemy and reduced it to a quite limited and potentially manageable number of takfiri religious fanatics whose ability to put significant numbers of fighters in the field rests solely on their ability to intimidate other Muslims via a “fight-or-die” ultimatum. Given this limited but deadly enemy, Kilcullen’s recipe for U.S. success in Afghanistan is to prolong our military intervention, but to refocus it on extracting the accidental guerrillas from the insurgent mix by focusing on reconstruction, Westernization, and the panoply of activities that fall under the concept of nation-building. “The ultimately decisive mission set is what we might call ‘military assistance,’” Kilcullen writes.

“This set of tasks aims to restructure the threat environment over the long term so that we hardwire the enemy out of it, deny them a role, reduce the recruiting base, and attack the conditions that generate the threat. This is the truly decisive activity…. But in [the] future we may need to apply ‘assistance by militaries’ or even by the whole of our government, to the whole of an at-risk society. … This means that cooperation with aid agencies, educators, departments of foreign affairs and state, intelligence services, economic development agencies — truly full-spectrum assistance — is required. This is the truly decisive activity at which we will need to become highly proficient if we are to break the accidental guerrilla cycle.” (p. 289)

Clearly, the foregoing is intervention and Westernization — for the latter, Kilcullen uses “creating the rule of law” — with both a vengeance and a very long on-the-ground timeframe. Even if we accept that the intricate and expensive program of cooperative military-political-social activities proposed by Kilcullen is possible in theory, there is absolutely no reason to believe such a program can be achieved in Afghanistan. Why?

First, the insurgents we confront in Afghanistan are not takfiris. They are mostly Salafis who have shown a remarkable ability to accommodate and work with approaches to religious practice that differ from their own. We have yet to run into an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan and, if we do, the Taliban or al-Qaeda will kill him to avoid another Anbar-like scenario. Therefore, the most basic premise of The Accidental Guerrilla — that the insurgents are takfiris — is inapplicable to Afghanistan.

Second, the U.S.-led coalition’s time in Afghanistan is quickly running out. The Karzai regime is terminally corrupt and incompetent, and we are already in the eighth winter of the war. Kilcullen’s proposed method of operation requires: (a) an almost 180-degree shift from the U.S.-NATO approach now being used; (b) a far greater foreign military and civilian presence to implement it; and (c) a commitment of substantial financial resources over an extended period of time. While the West could certainly change horses in the manner Kilcullen suggests, the shift would be pointless because the Afghan insurgency has already become as much a popular nationalist reaction to foreign occupation as it is a Salafi insurgency; there is not, Messrs. Blair, Reidel, and other Obama officials notwithstanding, a mass of accidental guerillas yearning to be separated from the Taliban-led coalition. Indeed, there would be no better way to ignite an ever broader anti-foreign Afghan nationalist insurgency than to follow Kilcullen’s recommendations that we patiently extend our already far too long occupation.

Overall, Kilcullen has written an informative and in many ways useful and insightful book. To his credit, he has caveated his theories to try to dissuade readers from believing that they can be applied and expected to work in all locales and situations. That said, The Accidental Guerrilla is a study explicitly written with an eye toward influencing the Obama administration’s Afghan policymaking, both parties in Congress, and Gen.David Petraeus, the book’s amazingly pure, courageous, brilliant, and knightly hero. Unfortunately, this lot has proven repeatedly that it is consistently able to ignore caveats, miss nuances, and fall deeply in love with any plan that even remotely justifies U.S. interventionism. Odds are that in the future much blame will be laid at Kilcullen’s feet for the defeat of the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan, blame that would be better placed at the door of America’s rabid, bipartisan interventionists who are now reinforcing failure in an already lost war.

Published: Antiwar.com