General and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry on the Persistent Failure of US Understanding in Afghanistan

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Lessons, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Karl W. Eikenberry
Karl W. Eikenberry

使用谷歌翻译在下一列的顶部。

गूगल अगले स्तंभ के शीर्ष पर अनुवाद का प्रयोग करें.

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گوگل اگلے کالم میں سب سے اوپر ترجمہ کا استعمال کریں.

Emphasis below added by Milt Bearden, former CIA chief in Pakistan also responsible for the field aspects of the CIA's covert support against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Foreign Affairs, September/October 2013

ESSAY

The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan
The Other Side of the COIN

Karl W. Eikenberry

Eikenberry, Obama, and General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, March 2010. (Pete Souza / White House)
Eikenberry, Obama, and General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, March 2010. (Pete Souza / White House)

KARL W. EIKENBERRY is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He served as Commanding General of the Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011.

Since 9/11, two consecutive U.S. administrations have labored mightily to help Afghanistan create a state inhospitable to terrorist organizations with transnational aspirations and capabilities. The goal has been clear enough, but its attainment has proved vexing. Officials have struggled to define the necessary attributes of a stable post-Taliban Afghan state and to agree on the best means for achieving them. This is not surprising. The U.S. intervention required improvisation in a distant, mountainous land with de jure, but not de facto, sovereignty; a traumatized and divided population; and staggering political, economic, and social problems. Achieving even minimal strategic objectives in such a context was never going to be quick, easy, or cheap.

Of the various strategies that the United States has employed in Afghanistan over the past dozen years, the 2009 troop surge was by far the most ambitious and expensive. Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was at the heart of the Afghan surge. Rediscovered by the U.S. military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency was updated and codified in 2006 in Field Manual 3-24, jointly published by the U.S. Army and the Marines. The revised
doctrine placed high confidence in the infallibility of military leadership at all levels of engagement (from privates to generals) with the indigenous population throughout the conflict zone. Military doctrine provides guidelines that inform how armed forces contribute to campaigns, operations, and battles. Contingent on context, military doctrine is
meant to be suggestive, not prescriptive.

Broadly stated, modern COIN doctrine stresses the need to protect civilian populations, eliminate insurgent leaders and infrastructure, and help establish a legitimate and accountable host-nation government able to deliver essential human services. Field Manual 3-24 also makes clear the extensive length and expense of COIN campaigns:  “Insurgencies are protracted by nature. Thus, COIN operations always demand considerable expenditures of time and resources.

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Milt Bearden: HIST 9 April 2009 Obama’s War

08 Wild Cards
Milt Bearden
Milt Bearden

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گوگل اگلے کالم میں سب سے اوپر ترجمہ کا استعمال کریں.

Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2009

POSTSCRIPT

Obama's War
Redefining Victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Milton Bearden

MILTON BEARDEN served as CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, where he was responsible for that agency's covert action program in support of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet-supported government.

Since the United States first dispatched troops to Afghanistan in October 2001, the war in Afghanistan has been an orphan of U.S. policy. But with the release last week of a revamped U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, the conflict has, by default, become Barack Obama's war.

In a Foreign Affairs essay [1] from November/December 2001, I chronicled the disasters that have befallen all foreign invaders of Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. Now, more than seven years into the U.S. intervention, the Obama administration must confront many of the same problems faced by all previous
occupiers of this rugged land. How the United States manages its presence there over the next year will determine if it can break the pattern.

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Milt Bearden: HIST March/April 2009 Curse of the Khyber Pass

08 Wild Cards
Milt Bearden
Milt Bearden

使用谷歌翻译在下一列的顶部。

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گوگل اگلے کالم میں سب سے اوپر ترجمہ کا استعمال کریں.

National Interest, March/April 2009

Curse of the Khyber Pass

Milt Bearden

Milton Bearden is a retired CIA officer who managed the cia’s covert assistance to the Afghans from Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He also served in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Nigeria, Sudan and Germany.

As the United States settles into its . eighth year of military operations in . Afghanistan, and as plans for ramping up U.S. troop strength are under way, we might reflect on an observation made by the Chinese military sage, Sun Tzu, about twenty-five hundred years ago:

In military campaigns I have heard of awkward speed but have never seen any skill in lengthy campaigns. No country has ever profited from protracted warfare.

These words tell the tale of the string of superpowers that have found themselves drawn into a fight in the inhospitable terrain we now call Afghanistan. Their stories of easy conquest followed by unyielding rebellion are hauntingly similar, from the earliest accounts of Alexander’s Afghan campaign, when, in 329 bc, the great warrior found the struggle longer, more brutal and more costly than his battle in Persia. And through six centuries the Mughals never managed to bring the Afghans to heel, and most certainly not the Pashtuns. Of course, there were also the disastrous expeditions of Britain and the Soviet Union. Now it is up to the Obama administration to try to change the long odds in what will become America’s longest war.

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Milt Bearden: HIST Nov/Dec 2001 Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires

08 Wild Cards
Milt Bearden
Milt Bearden

使用谷歌翻译在下一列的顶部。

गूगल अगले स्तंभ के शीर्ष पर अनुवाद का प्रयोग करें.

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Используйте Google Translate на вершине соседней колонке.

گوگل اگلے کالم میں سب سے اوپر ترجمہ کا استعمال کریں.

Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001

Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires

Milton Bearden

MILTON BEARDEN served as CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, where he was responsible for that agency's covert action program in support of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet-supported government.

THE GREAT GAME

MICHNI POINT, Pakistan's last outpost at the western end of the barren, winding Khyber Pass, stands sentinel over Torkham Gate, the deceptively orderly border crossing into Afghanistan. Frontier Scouts in gray shalwar kameezes (traditional tunics and loose pants) and black berets patrol the lonely station commanded by a major of the legendary Khyber Rifles, the militia force that has been guarding the border with Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, first for British India and then for Pakistan. This spot, perhaps more than any other, has witnessed the traverse of the world's great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia. All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals.

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Berto Jongman: CENTCOM Underground War Room in Amman to Manage US War on Syria

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, DoD, IO Deeds of War
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

New Centcom underground war room in Amman for US intervention in Syria

DEBKAfile Video August 17, 2013, 1:58 PM

Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in Amman this week to inaugurate the Centcom’s Forward Command in Jordan manned by 273 US officers. US media correspondents were permitted to visit the new war room for the first time on condition of non-disclosure of its location and secret facilities. debkafile’s military sources report that the installation is bomb- and missile-proof against a possible Syrian attack. The US Air Force command section is in direct communication with the US, Israeli, Jordanian and Saudi Air Force headquarters ready for an order by President Barack Obama to impose a partial no-fly zone over Syrian air space.

Another section is designed to coordinate operations between US and Jordanian special forces, as well as the units trained in commando combat by US instructors in Jordan.  A closed section houses CIA personnel who control the work of US agents going in and out of Syria and also a communications center.

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Berto Jongman: Syria False Flags & Mystery Munitions, Blowback To UK

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

US-Trained Rebels Moved Towards Damascus Days Before ‘Chemical Attack’

Lawmakers who opposed arming FSA militants “reconsider intervention”

Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars.com, August 23, 2013

300 handpicked rebel militants trained by the US, Israel and Jordan entered Syria and began advancing towards Damascus in the days before an alleged chemical weapons attack, the French newspaper Le Figaro is reporting.

“The rebels were trained for several months in a training camp on the Jordanian-Syrian border by CIA operatives, as well as Jordanian and Israeli commandos,” reports the Jerusalem Post.

Read full article.

See Also:

Mystery Munitions Video

How Might Syria Come Back to the UK?

Afghanistan Beats Pakistan in Soccer — First Meeting Since 1970’s — Ecstasy Among the People — Has USA Noticed?

08 Wild Cards
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

In First Meeting Since 1970s, Afghanistan Tops Pakistan In Soccer

NPR's Sean Carberry was at today's game; he filed this report for our Newscast unit:

“Thousands of fans, and hundreds of security forces, packed into the small stadium in Kabul. After a slow start, the Afghan team scored, and then never let Pakistan back into the game.

“Abdullah is a street vendor who paid about three dollars for his ticket.

“‘Afghans have suffered 30 years of war,' he says in Dari, ‘so we need this kind of entertainment.'

“But Mohammad Yousef Kargar, the coach of the Afghan team, says the game was about more than entertainment.

“‘So, one of the prime objectives of this match was to bring two nations together,' he says.

As Sean reports, the 3-0 win certainly united the Afghans. The game is the first in a scheduled home-and-home series between the two nations. It also served as revenge of a sort, as Afghanistan's victory came one day after its national under-23 team in cricket.

Read full article.

Read other articles with extracts and photos — a hugely important story.

Continue reading “Afghanistan Beats Pakistan in Soccer — First Meeting Since 1970's — Ecstasy Among the People — Has USA Noticed?”