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Nothing like dueling Steves (see previous post).

Dr. Steve Metz of SSI compares the surges of Obama and Bush and finds them to be cut from the same cloth. Hat tip to SWJ Blog.

How Obama”s Surge is Like Bush’s

….Ultimately, though, the Obama strategy in Afghanistan and the Bush strategy in Iraq are more alike than different–variations on a theme rather than stark alternatives. Both were attempts to give a beleaguered ally an opportunity to reverse its slide into disaster. And both were gambles. In Iraq, President Bush bet that the Maliki government would rein in sectarian violence, and that the Iraqi Security Forces were nearly ready to assume responsibility for their nation’s security. This panned out. Now President Obama is making the same bet. His strategy is contingent on the Afghan security forces, bolstered by increased assistance from the U.S. military, being able to conduct counterinsurgency on its own by 2011. Even more importantly, Obama’s plan is contingent on the Karzai government’s reining in its crushing corruption and addressing the myriad problems that the Afghan people face. If the Afghan security forces or the Karzai government are not up to the task, nothing the United States can do will matter. A surge of 20,000, 30,000, or 100,000 would be equally irrelevant. Unfortunately, only President Karzai and the Afghan security forces can determine whether the Obama strategy works. Our fate is in their hands.

Read the rest here. 

Steve has spotted a poor contingency for the administration to rely upon. Putting the war strategy on Karzai’s performance is akin to building a house on quicksand. It might look a little like wet cement but it is not going to harden into a foundation no matter how much time passes. We need to work within the parameters of our own capacities and with realistic and not utopian options.

We’d garner more goodwill giving every Afghan child a pony than by waiting for villagers to see honest officials from Kabul appear. It’d be cheaper too.

I’ll be frank, as I am short for time until Dec. 7th, so I riffed this straight from SWJ Blog  which also posted a critique by Robert Haddick here.

My reader’s digest take – the president split the difference between the myriad factions in the national security community in a way that ultimately leaves his options open. A cautious, calculating, choice unless he gave General McChrystal carte blanche on new black ops inside Pakistan. That would not be unimportant – al Qaida safe houses in Quetta and rural Baluchistan blowing up would not be insignificant.

For what it is worth, in terms of domestic politics, President Obama is well to the right of the Democratic Party on Afghanistan, at least in terms of the activist base. The self-described “progressives” are not happy tonight.

That was my two cents. Fire at will in comments section….

ADDENDUM:

Will there be a “Revolt of the Progressives?” Here is one reaction to the speech from an important leftwing blog.

Goldman Sachs and other banksters wrangled swine flu vaccines ahead of most medical workers and high risk patients. Nice.

Do not hold your breath waiting for a Congressional investigation or a New York Times or Newsweek expose of how this happened and who is responsible. Much like when we endured the ridiculously laudatory coverage of the death of the corrupt and not especially pro-American Benazir Bhutto,  whose Ivy League matriculation and socializing with the American elite decades ago ensured her enduring American political support, plenty of MSM senior editors went to school with these guys. And the congressional staffers with their sons.

The Greco-Roman historian Polybius is instructive on this matter. He writes in his The Histories :

Rise and Fall of Aristocratic Rule

15    But as soon as the people got leaders, they cooperated with them against the dynasty for the reasons I have mentioned; and then kingship and despotism were alike entirely abolished, and aristocracy once more began to revive and start afresh. For in their immediate gratitude to those who had deposed the despots, the people employed them as leaders, and entrusted their interests to them; who, looking upon this charge at first as a great privilege, made the public advantage their chief concern, and conducted all kinds of business, public or private, with diligence and caution.

16    But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.

The Oligarchy of Good Feelings is here.

ADDENDUM:

Dan of TDAXP has sharp commentary and additional links on this disgusting story of insider corruption.

Of course, we should not be surprised. Recall during the Anthrax terror attacks how Senators, staffers and connected Beltway bandits who were not exposed to Anthrax, hoarded Cipro for themselves while the postal workers who had been endangered by bioterrorism received nothing? The mail guys were only peons of course. Not like they went to Harvard Business School or Yale Law or anything….

UPDATE:

Fabius Maximus takes issue with how the media, and by extension, myself as well, have characterized this issue:

More media madness: rich fat bankers get flu vaccine while children die!

It is a good counterpoint and worth reading – though I still find the damage control effort of the public health official cited  by FM to not be terribly convincing, the program would at least seem to be legal. Whether scarce vaccines should be distributed this way is another issue.

Charles Cameron, who has appeared here before, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Charles will be doing a new series of posts here at Zenpundit that will drill down into the important but often elusive religious-cultural connections that impact American national security and foreign policy issues.

Very pleased to have him aboard:

SPEAK THE LANGUAGES, KNOW THE MODES OF THOUGHT:

by Charles Cameron

SSgt. David Flaherty, currently deployed as the Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team’s public information officer, is to be congratulated on speaking Pashto. But Wired‘s Danger Room comment, “The fact that this is considered newsworthy and exceptional — a U.S. military officer speaks one of the official languages of Afghanistan! — doesn’t reflect well on the national commitment to Afghanistan” is also to the point.

A couple of other recent items in the news about languages and translation at home and abroad should concern us.A report from the US Department of Justice on the FBI’s Translation Project was less than enthusiastic, not only finding that significant quantities of material collected in the Bureau’s highest-priority counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence collection categories were never evaluated, but that the number of translators inn the FBI pool had diminished since a 2005 audit, that in 2008 the FBI met its hiring goals for linguists in only 2 of its 14 critical languages, that security clearance and language proficiency training for a new linguist took 19 months before hiring could take place, and that 70 percent of the FBI’s own linguists in the field offices tested did not attend the FBIs required training course.

And retired and renowned Marine colonel Thomas X. Hammes was quoted in a recent piece on CBC News about allegations of “botched” translations in the Afghan theater leading NATO troops to faulty conclusions as saying, “We’re willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure ice cream and steak is there, and I would trade all of that for my entire tour if I could have one decent translator. Many times I’d trade body armor for a translator.”I want to suggest, though, that there is another aspect to this business. I was reminded of it when reading the FBI complaint against Luqman Ameen Abdullah and others connected with the recent events in Detroit. The complaint includes the phrase, “Abdullah also said that thegovernment plots and plans against them so they need to plot and plan in return”. The complaint doesn’t mention it, but that’s an echo of the words of the Qur’an, 8.30:

 “And when those who disbelieve plot against thee (O Muhammad) to wound thee fatally, or to kill thee or to drive thee forth; they plot, but Allah (also) plotteth; and Allah is the best of plotters.”

What this suggests to me is that we need to be able to speak / read not only spoken or written languages of our sources, suspects, informants and opponents — but also the language or underlying logic of their thought. A close reading of the Detroit complaint’s text in association with that of the Qur’an gives us an understanding that Abdullah views his plotting as aligned with Allah’s. This in itself may not seems surprising, but it suggests a manner of reading that may prove fruitful in other occasions, and that’s the point I want to make.

Whatever the merits of the particular case of Luqman Abdullah — and I note that some respected analysts have their questions about that — it will be found to hold true in general that jihadist thought moves along Qur’anic pathways as surely as jihadist behavior parallels the behavior of Mohammed. A keen awareness of both will thus allow us to understand where the touching of familiar chords is most apt to stir the hearts of fellow believers, and hence strengthen the bonds of community and dedication between them.

When bin Laden retreated to the caves of Tora Bora, he was following in his Prophet’s footsteps, as Lawrence Wright masterfully showed in *The Looming Tower*. His spoken words often follow Qur’anic precedent in much the same way.Bin Laden’s address to the US just before the 2004 elections was a case in point for me. I read three translations (CNN, MEMRI, Al-Jazeera), none of which included the Qur’anic citation that headed the whole thing, and figured out what it must be from the repeated echoes in the text, notably “and just as you lay waste to our Nation, so shall we lay waste to yours”.

That put me very strongly in mind of Qur’an 2.194:

“For the prohibited month, and so for all things prohibited, there is the law of equality. If then any one transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him. But fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.”

Okay, I could figure out that bin Laden had this passage in mind as I read the transcripts of his address — but it wasn’t until I saw ABC’s transcript that I could confirm that Bin laden did indeed reference that verse directly.

Which powerfully reinforces the idea that bin Laden views his jihad against the US in terms of measured reciprocity — a notion which should give us pause every time we take an action which we would not choose to have taken against us…

And how good are we at this kind of “reading in parallel” — both abroadand at home?

To return to the Detroit affair, as UCLA’s Jean Rosenfeld pointed out, the NYT report on the event contained the phrase “a faction of a group called the Ummah, meaning the Brotherhood” — a completely misleading
translation which might suggest ties with the Egyptian “Muslim Brotherhood” — when the plain meaning of “Ummah” is the transnational community of Muslims. The New York Times is our newspaper of record.

The Times, in turn, was likely paraphrasing the FBI’s own press release, which speaks of “part of a group which calls themselves Ummah (‘the brotherhood’)”. It’s notable, though, that there is no mention of the
“brotherhood” in the entire 45 pages of the actual FBI complaint, written by those more closely involved with the investigation.

What the complaint itself does say is that the name “Ummah” was used as a cover for the movement’s real name, the “Dar-ul-Islam Movement“.

Okay, that’s a beginning…

And still our transcriptions of jihadist messages all too often omit religious content. Indeed, when the Joint Forces Command asked Jim Lacey to edit abu Musab al-Suri’s massive Call to Global Islamic Resistance for publication in English translation, he (rightly) produced a condensed version, but (wrongly, IMO) “also removed most of the repetitive theological justifications undergirding” al-Suri’s project.

[ Zen  ed.  Note: copy released to general public as A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey]

Lacey’s work is still a significant contribution, as I intend to detail in an upcoming review. But the omission of almost all trace of al-Suri’s significant messianic-Mahdist content, as you’d expect, leaves me wincing.

We need to be able to “read” jihad — this really shouldn’t need saying, eight years after 9/11, ten after Nairobi and Dar — against its Islamic background.

Always.

Futurist Jamais Cascio on strategic forecasting:

Futures Thinking: Asking the Question

….”Asking the Question” is the first step in a formal futures thinking project. At first glance, it should be easy–after all, you should know what you’re trying to figure out. Unfortunately, while it may be simple to ask a question, asking the right question is much more challenging It’s easy to ask questions that are too vague, too narrow, or assume the answer; it’s much more difficult to ask a question that can elicit both surprises and useful results.

….It’s a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution–a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the “best response” may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision.

Cascio’s framing of dilemmas is reminiscient of a discussion I had here a while back with Dave Schuler regarding “wicked problems” though dilemmas appear to be more generic a class of difficulties ( all dilemmas are not wicked problems but all wicked problems represent a dilemma). There is a lot of merit to the frame that Cascio is using and it points to the dysfunctionality present in top tier national security decision making.

Pakistan, for example, represents a serious dilemma for the United States.We need to begin, as Cascio suggests, by framing the right questions. A better question than “Is Pakistan an ally?” would be “Is Pakistan our enemy?”

Islamabad is a major state sponsor of terrorist groups, perhaps the largest on earth in that regard. It has a poor record – again one of the world’s worst – on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security issues. Pakistan’s civilian elite is amazingly corrupt and it’s thoroughly undemocratic senior officer corps of the Army only moderately less so. Pakistani public opinion borders on delusional with any issue tangentially connected to India and in the main, informed Pakistanis deeply resent it when their own policies of sponsoring terrorism cause other countries to become angry with Pakistan and take any kind of retaliatory action. It’s political system is polarized and unstable.

Yet while Pakistan is deeply hostile to America and cannot “be bought”, their deep corruption means that they can be “rented”. Pakistan is the major and irreplaceable conduit for supplies to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military will grudgingly cooperate in providing intelligence for drone attackson the militant terror groups that the ISI aids, directs and trains. Pakistan is ready to sacrifice many pawns but not any chesspiece of significance.

The American elite tend to speak of Pakistan as an “ally”, when the reality is that Pakistan is a sullen and coerced client, and to profess great concern about Pakistan’s “stability. This falsehood permits the illusion of “partnership” with Pakistan and makes it politically easier for the administration of the day to secure appropriations from the Congress for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unfortunately, this facade creates a mental fog of unwarranted reassurance when clarity is most needed to assess our strategic choices and make any of them with decisiveness. A permanent preference for “muddling through” and crisis management has taken root.

Pakistan’s elite by contrast, tell visiting Secretaries of State how much they hate America and continue to endorse aiding the very violent Islamist groups that are eating away at the authority and legitmacy of the Pakistani state like a horde of termites. The elite regularly exercises its far smaller degree of national power with infinitely greater ruthlessness than its American counterparts, not appearing to care all that much about “stability”. The Pakistanis are willing to play hardball yet the USG shrinks from doing so.

Something does not compute here and that something is us.

ADDENDUM:

Tom Barnett views Karzai as an even worse strategic bet than dealing with Pakistan ( but also thinks our diplomatic play is hamfisted and obtuse), saying the Obama administration should “take advantage of this fiasco“.