Sebastian Junger:

A strategic passage wanted by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley is among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces. One platoon is considered the tip of the American spear. Its men spend their days in a surreal combination of backbreaking labor—building outposts on rocky ridges—and deadly firefights, while they try to avoid the mistakes the Russians made. Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington join the platoon’s painfully slow advance, as its soldiers laugh, swear, and run for cover, never knowing which of them won’t make it home.

Into the Valley of Death

The surprising force behind torture: democracies

Torture, American style

On Wednesday, December 5, The Jamestown Foundation and the Institute for Gulf Affairs co-hosted a conference entitled “The al-Qaeda Triangle: Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” featuring a keynote address by Ahmed Rashid. The event brought together some of the world’s preeminent terrorism analysts—including numerous best-selling authors and political advisors—for a discussion on al-Qaeda’s ideology, logistics and future as a threat vis-à-vis the West, and was attended by nearly 400 policymakers, intelligence officials, academics and other interested individuals. Speakers at the conference included Peter Bergen (pictured), Bruce Hoffman, Daniel Benjamin, Special Advisor to the Iraqi Vice President Zuhair Humadi, Michael Scheuer, Stephen Ulph, Laith Kubba, Hassan Abbas, Marc Sageman, Ali Ibrahim, Brynjar Lia, Ali al-Ahmed and Reidar Visser. Ahmed Rashid delivered the keynote address, entitled “The Crucial Nexus: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas,” which assessed the current situation on the ground as well as the viability of current Western policies there. Multiple media outlets—including Voice of America—were present at the event, and streaming video will be made available soon under the “Events” tab of the Jamestown website.

The Jamestown Foundation Hosts Al-Qaeda Conference

You wouldn't know it from the front pages, but there is major fighting going on in Afghanistan right now.

The Afghan forces were said to be proving their mettle in the latest combat. “These guys have no hesitation in killing the Taliban,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Simon Downey, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, which is “mentoring” the Afghan troops.

The arrangement was not without frustrations. The Afghans were supposedly fighting under their own command. Yet they could barely function without Nato’s protection and Nato had to cajole them to move forward.

Another complication was the use of cannabis by Afghan soldiers. “Hashish is part of our culture,” said an Afghan officer. “It is just like whisky and wine for you.”

While you are checking out Drinking Across America: A Look at the 25 Best Microbreweries in the Country, remember:

Researchers caution, however, that if we humans are congenitally inclined to drink, we are designed to do so only in moderation. We are not, in other words, Syrian hamsters.

From NYT:

“We will carry out a hit-and-run war,” he said. “Losing Musa Qala doesn’t mean that we will stop fighting.”

Terror on road to Taliban stronghold

More than six years after the start of the ‘war on terror’, America and its allies are less safe, their enemies stronger and more numerous, and the war’s key geographic battleground, the greater Middle East, dangerously unstable. In Iraq, thousands of American soldiers, and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, have been killed or wounded while more than 150,000 US troops fight to contain an insurgency and a civil war at a cost of over $300 million per day. In Iran, an Islamic fundamentalist regime remains firmly in power and is defiantly pursuing a nuclear-weapons programme, undermining American efforts in Iraq and subsidising increasingly brazen terrorist groups in the Middle East. The Gaza Strip is now led by one terrorist group, Hamas, while another, Hizbullah, is increasingly influential in Lebanon and increasingly popular on the streets of the Middle East. Syria remains under an anti-American dictatorship allied to Iran, and no real peace process between Israel and any of its neighbours exists.

More broadly, according to repeated public opinion polls, the popularity and credibility of the United States is at an all-time low. Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is far more popular in the Muslim world than President George W. Bush; most Muslims would prefer to see China, Russia or France replace America as the dominant outside power; and majorities even among America’s traditional allies now have a highly unfavourable view of the United States. While the US homeland has not been attacked since 2001, Osama bin Laden remains at large, and there have been far more Islamist terrorist attacks around the world since 2001 than in the six years before the ‘war on terror’ was launched. Far from being ‘on the march’, democracy in the Middle East is in trouble, and where it has advanced, in most cases – including Palestine, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon – it has produced unintended and often unwanted consequences. For a war that has now been going on longer than the Second World War, the balance sheet is dismal.

Winning the Right War

The United States has been actively engaged in prosecuting the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) since September 2001. However, after 5 years of national effort that has included the loss of over 3,000 service members in combat operations, many question whether the U.S. strategy is working, and whether the United States understands how to combat an enemy motivated by a radical revolutionary religious ideology. The author reviews the pertinent cultural history and background of Islam and then posits three root causes of this conflict: the lack of wealth-sharing in Islamic countries, resentment of Western exploitation of Islamic countries, and a U.S. credibility gap within the Islamic community. Following this discussion of root causes, this analysis compares the Ends, Ways and Means of the U.S. Strategy for Combating Terrorism with that of terrorist organizations such as al-Qai’da. The author concludes that the United States is not achieving its long-term strategic objectives in the GWOT. He then recommends that U.S. strategy focus on the root causes of Islamic hostility. Accordingly, the United States should combat radical Islam from within the Islamic community by consistently supporting the efforts of moderate Islamic nations to build democratic institutions that are acceptable in Islamic terms.

The Global War on Terrorism: A Religious War?

The most provocative aspect of Goldsmith's argument, however, is also the least persuasive. He contends that the problem was not that Addington and the administration did not care sufficiently about the law, but that they cared too intensely, so much so that they were "strangled by law." He claims that "this war has been lawyered to death," and describes government officials as overly chilled by the prospect that they might be held criminally accountable for actions taken in the name of the country's security. Goldsmith prefers the good old days when matters of national security and war were, for the most part, not regulated by federal legislation, and presidents, such as FDR, were free to shape their judgments without regard for law, and could concentrate instead on "political legitimation." In the post-Watergate era, he laments, Congress passed "many of the laws that so infuriatingly tied the President's hands in the post-9/11 world." This view, of course, is fully consonant with that of Cheney and Addington. Cheney, for example, told reporters on board Air Force One in 2005 that "a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs."

It's interesting how none of this perspective comes through in the PBS specials or the NYT stories. Was he "saving it" for his book?

The Man Behind the Torture

Following up on the Tariq Ali op-ed:

The axe has fallen on the judiciary (Iftikhar Hussein Chaudhry). At the Supreme Court level, 12 judges have bowed out while in the provinces 48 judges have found themselves without a job. While confrontation will intensify in the coming days, the alacrity with which some of the key vacated slots have been filled indicates a national divide that might help the Musharraf administration to control the situation. He has a political coalition which will back him, and he has politicians like Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Ms Benazir Bhutto who opposed the “revolutionary” intent of the confrontationists and may now cooperate if the situation doesn’t get out of hand.

In the “struggle” for democracy, the retreat of the state in the face of Al Qaeda’s terrorism had been either “denied” or subordinated to the higher goals of untrammelled democracy. The unrealistic, and some would say adventurist, confrontationist slogan was: get the general out of the system, dump the “American agenda”, and terrorism will vanish overnight. On the other hand, the warlords who spearhead the Al Qaeda thrust in Pakistan put forward conditions of ceasefire that no one pays heed to: removal of America and NATO from Iraq and Afghanistan and the proclamation of Islam of the Taliban variety in Pakistan.

Wages of confrontation

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraib and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

See also Keith Olbermann's Special Comment.

Waterboarding is Torture… Period.

Counterterrorism, like espionage and covert action, is not a spectator sport. The more a country practices, the better it gets.

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As a practical matter, there will always be a trade-off of sorts between citizen liberties and the powers a state needs to fight certain threats. Yet it is the paramount duty of any liberal democracy not only to protect the rights associated with a decent political order, but also to protect the lives of its citizens. Exercising power in the name of security is not necessarily illiberal. And as our examination of the French approach to counterterrorism suggests, the exercise of such power can be considerable indeed. It is a point that some liberal and civil libertarian critics of the Bush administration, who too rarely study what is going on abroad, might do well to remember.

France: Europe's Counterterrorist Powerhouse