One of the probable spinoffs of America's disastrous “you are with us or against us” unilateralism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iran, etc., is a loss of our moral authority to lead other nations into supporting our adventures. In this regard, the future of Nato is the big question mark. This question can not be separated from the internal stress now endangering the future of EU. The attached op-ed by William Pfaff, a euro-centered, American writer, provides an interesting perspective on these questions. CS
What Next for NATO?
Posted By William Pfaff On May 18, 2010 @ 11:00 pm
The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at this moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
CS Note: Note this is focused on deterring Israel and is consistent with Turkey's emerging regional grand strategy of rapprochement with its neighbors, in this case Iran and Syria.
Thursday May 13, 2010 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies
Turkey has installed Anti-Aircraft Hawk Missiles at a village close to the Syrian border in an attempt to prevent Israeli war jets from violating Turkish Airspace in case of an attack against Iran or Syria.
A Turkish paper reported that Turkey will not allow Israel to use its Airspace to attack Iran, Syria or any other country, and will act against any such violations.
The Anti Aircraft batteries were installed in Kayeel village, south of Turkey and located close to the Syrian b14 Mayorder.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Turkish military official stated that the batteries are meant to protect Turkey and its Airspace against any violations, including American or Israeli war jets should Israel or the United States decide to attack Iran or Syria.
Turkey Installs Anti-Aircraft Batteries Near Syrian Border
The below article by Professor Aruri is an excellent summary of the Palestinian-Israel conflict. It provides yet more information on why the two-state solution is kaput. Had he discussed the water issue, his case would have been even stronger, but this is a nitpick on an excellent analysis that is both clearly and succinctly written.
Phi Beta Iota: The author's bottom line quote and quick link:
Within a few years, Palestinians are likely to constitute a majority in all the territories controlled by Israel today. Already, the prospects of a workable and durable two-state solution have been ruled out. Will the President use the financial resources the US provides Israel as a means of enforcement and pressure? Most likely, no. Finally, if the process fails, will the President be prepared to give a full accounting of why it failed? Again, most likely, no. Perhaps a single state based on the equal protection of the law (as in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) could emerge as the only humane alternative to the insufferable status-quo.
Naseer Aruri, is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author of
The following spaghetti diagram has been making the round of Versailles … it purports to summarize the strategy for winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans. But this is just the tip of the systems dynamics iceberg. This diagram is based on an attempt to model the non linear feedbacks implied in General Petraeus's Counter Insurgency Manual, FM 3-24. I do not know whether this is the product of a contractor or the military, the author of the technique was a Navy officer in 2008, but this is 2010 and the graphic has a contractor logo.
The author of the famous Afghan Spaghetti diagram is Navy Capt Brett Pierson, who worked on the JCS staff in the Pentagon. Pierson's bis is, reproduced below:
“Captain Brett Pierson is a 1987 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and was designated a Naval Aviator in 1989. Fleet assignments have included VS-38, VS-33, and a command tour as the Commanding Officer of VFA-147. He has been deployed in support of Operations SOUTHERN WATCH, RESTORE HOPE, and IRAQI FREEDOM. Brett is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School and was named the 1997 FORCE Test Pilot of the Year and 2002 USAF TPS Outstanding Flight Instructor. Captain Pierson has over 650 carrier arrested landings and 3,500 flight hours in 50 different aircraft. In December 2006 he reported to the Pentagon for duty on the Joint Staff where he currently serves in the Warfighting Analysis Division of J8. While on the Joint Staff, he was awarded the 2007 DoD Modeling and Simulation Award for Excellence for his work developing a system dynamics model of counterinsurgency based on the Army Field Manual FM 3-24.”
Reference A: System Dynamics and Coin Modeling 2010
The intellectual framework in the preceding briefing was then tailored specifically for Afghanistan in a the brief that culminated in the famous spaghetti Diagram. That brief is attached here. Note the explanatory comments are more in the manner of hypothecated assertions rather than empirically derived relationships.
For those of you who think these spaghetti diagrams reflect a new or innovative way of thinking about systems I refer you to the following figure of the comm links in Europe that were being designed in the mid 1970s to deal with a Soviet led attack on the Nato countries in Western Europe — the chart was produce in the mid-to-late 1970s and reached the four star level in the Air Force. The figure was later reproduced in my book, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans Reality Mismatch (Westview 1985).
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CS comments:
This Powerpoint Briefing is the dynamics model of FM-24, the Counterinsurgency Manual for which Pierson one the award in 2007. It is converted into PDF format for easier access.
Phi Beta Iota: All of the above is earnest, well-intentioned, even brilliant in its conceptualization–like the movie Top Gun–it's wonderful right up to the point where it crashes and burns from its complete disconnect from reality. USA does not have the collection, processing, analysis, or decision-making capacity to leverage any of these concepts. The ONLY way to get this right is to start with integrity in the first place (don't send our troops in harm's way based on lies, ideology, and treasonous misappropriation of the public purse), and to have hundreds of thousands of human brains that are trained, equipped, and organized for multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, and multidomain information sharing and sense-making (M4IS2) without regard to secrecy, technology, or money. The US Government is, in one word, stupid, at the same time that its leadership (both political and professional) is completely lacking in integrity.
The Inevitable Collapse of McChrystal's Afghan War Plan
Bound to Fail
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
Nisos Kos, Greece
In the 11 May issue of CounterPunch, apparently based on White House and Pentagon sources, Gareth Porter, one of the most able journalists covering the Afghan debacle, reported that General McChrystal’s war plan is in the early stages of unravelling. To appreciate why this was entirely predictable, consider please, the following:
On January 2, during an interview with Drew Brown of Stars and Stripes, McChrystal described his plan to create an ‘arc of security’ in the most densely populated regions of Southern Afghanistan. The green shaded area in the following map of Afghanistan overlays McChystal’s arc on the distribution of population densities. I constructed it from the information contained in Brown’s interview. As you can see, McChrystal plan opens his biggest military campaign to date by invading a region that has seen many invasions and much fighting during the last two thousand years, including operations by Alexander the Great (also shown on the chart), both of the 19th Century Anglo-Afghan Wars, and the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s.
Original Story at CounterPunch
Historically minded tribal cultures, like the Pashtun, have had plenty of time to learn and remember the strengths and weaknesses of this terrain by resisting these invaders using the timeless arts of guerrilla war. Note, for example, the stunning similarity of Alexander the Great’s invasion route in the figure to that of the Soviet’s shown here.
McChrystal’s first move in implementing his pacification strategy was to invade Marjah (which is in the western part of the shaded area) in mid February. The aim of this operation was a variation of Marshall Lyautey’s ink spot theory: namely to clear the Taliban out of Marjah, secure the area, and prevent the return of the Taliban. Success in this operation would set the stage spreading the area of pacification by clearing the Taliban out of the more populated city of Qandahar. And so, moving from west to east along Alexander’s (and the Soviet’s) route, the ink spot would spread to Qandahar in the eastern part of the arc.
Without being critical, I note that neither Porter nor his sources mention the role of Afghan army and police forces in the unravelling of McChrystal’s plan. Porter is certainly aware of these limitations, having written several important reports on this subject. Nevertheless, the implication of the Taliban re-infiltration of the Marjah region is clear: the Afghan security forces in the region are either insufficient or ineffective (or both) to perform their job of protecting the people by permanently cleansing the area of Taliban.
The inability to spread the “ink spot” McChrystal tried to insert with the Marjah offensive has its roots in the central flaw highlighted last September in my critique of McChrystal’s escalation plan, which was submitted to President Obama last summer. This inability also means that US forces will be needed to provide security to the Marjah region, if McChrystal sticks to his strategic aim. This requirement, which would have been easily foreseen, had McChrystal presented Mr. Obama with a straightforward assessment of the very limited capabilities of the Afghan security forces, will now result in our forces being spread out to protect this region, assuming we want to protect the Marjah “ink spot.” The deployment of US pacification troops will probably take the form of an array of strong points and outposts, backed up with quick reaction reinforcements, kept on alert in nearby bases, together with airpower.
If our troops are being deployed this way, they will be unavailable for the upcoming Qandahar offensive. Moreover, they will become vulnerable to being attacked piecemeal in a series of irregular, but frequent hit and run attacks on bases and supply routes. This kind of rope-a-dope strategy will keep our troops on edge and put them under continual mental and physical stress — and they will be vulnerable to being ground down much like the British troops were last summer. The continuing pressure will naturally increase the jumpiness of our soldiers and marines and, if past is prologue, will likely increase their trigger-happiness, including more calls for artillery and air support. More firepower means more civilian deaths in the “pacified” region, and the rising bloodshed will play into the Taliban’s hands by alienating the hearts and minds of local population we claim to be protecting, a process which is already in progress.
This hydra of emerging pressures, which is probably just beginning to be appreciated, is probably why the looming offensive to secure Qandahar that McChrystal was broadcasting in April is now being scaled back in its aims.
Later this summer, as these problems become more apparent and American mid-term elections loom, we can expect to be subjected to a unseemly spectacle finger pointing and a search for scapegoats. In the end, the debacle will be fault of Obama and by extension the Democrat’s, because the President ignored Sun Tzu’s timeless wisdom, when he approved McChrystal’s fatally flawed plan, despite the cabled warnings of retired Army general Karl Eikenberry, his ambassador to Afghanistan.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not ordinary citizens). If and when the need arises, any bit of news that is damaging to the targeted state will be fed into the demonization process — and in the marvelous propaganda system of the West, the grossest distortions will be swallowed and regurgitated without much guilt or apology, even upon the exposure of exceptional gullibility and dishonesty. The dishonesty, gullibility, double standard, and hypocrisy are handled with an aplomb that Pravda and Izvestia could never muster in the Soviet era.
. . . . . . .
Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago
Phi Beta Iota: See the table at the Monthly Review Zine to truly appreciate the spectacular relevance of the total commentary by the lead author who with Noam Chomsky was a half-century ahead of the pack in understanding how Potemkin Democracy might be foisted on a deliberately disengaged public.
The CIA recommendations for influencing the European public into continuing their support for the mission in Afghanistan is receiving a lot of attention both in The Netherlands and beyond. But in a military conflict, war is only one stage of the struggle. The biggest struggle is for the hearts and minds of the public at large. What's special about the case of the document is not so much its content, but the fact that it is now available for all to see.
At the top of the CIA-document it states: ‘Why counting on apathy might not be enough'.
