Despite Afghanistan Spiraling Out of Control, Allen Wants No Drawdown Acceleration Until After Election

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There can be no doubt that American troops in Afghanistan have become nothing more than political pawns for the Obama administration. Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, General John R. Allen, who commands US forces in Afghanistan, made it clear that there will be no increase in the rate of troop drawdown from Afghanistan before the end of the year — a move that even the New York Times identifies as likely being more political than strategic:

The top allied commander in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that he would not be recommending further American troop reductions until late this year, after the departure of the current “surge” forces and the end of the summer fighting season.

That timetable would defer one of the thorniest military decisions facing President Obama — the pace at which the United States removes its forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 — until after the November elections.

If strategic reviews were based on changes in operating conditions (remember the old catchphrase “conditions on the ground”?), then the current situation would rightly call for immediate action. However, since the Obama administration senses that any adjustments in the strategy for Afghanistan now would be a tacit admission that the current strategy has flaws, the craven decision is to delay the review until after the November elections have taken place. It appears that the lives of our troops are a lower priority than winning the election.

That no real progress is being made in terms of reducing violence in Afghanistan was made crystal clear by the valiant truth-telling from Lt. Col. Daniel Davis. In addition, despite attempts to retroactively classify a key report on the ongoing cultural clash between US and Afghan forces, fratricide appears to be on a path of increasing frequency, as well.

In a Defense Department release coinciding with Allen’s testimony, we have more denial of the cultural clash:

Recent incidents have been deplorable, but they will not stand in the way of accomplishing goals in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force commander said here.

Marine Corps Gen. John R. Allen also said the incidents do not represent the actions of the vast majority of U.S. military personnel who have served in Afghanistan.

Three incidents have been lumped together, the general said: desecration of corpses, the accidental burning of Qurans and the murder of 16 Afghans in Kandahar province. “It’s important to understand that while tragic, these few incidents do not represent who we are,” Allen said during an interview. “The Afghan people know that, the Afghan government knows that, and more importantly, the Afghan national security forces know who we are.”

Allen emphasized that U.S. and Afghan forces have been working together for years, and many Afghans and Americans have close working relationships. Read more →

Chain of Command: Some Violations of Military Discipline Are More Equal Than Others

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The other day, Teddy Partridge noted a second instance of someone in the military–the previous one being the Commander-in-Chief–weighing in on Bradley Manning’s guilt.

Echoing his commander in chief in issuing statements that provide improper command influence in the trial of Bradley Manning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, stated unequivocally that Manning broke the law.

To review, here’s what Barack Obama said when asked about Bradley Manning in April 2011:

And if you’re in the military… And I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren’t allowed to, I’d be breaking the law.

We’re a nation of laws! We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

It appears that President Obama’s highest military officer agrees with him:

The Joint Chiefs chairman also was asked about Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks contributor, and whether Dempsey thought Manning should be viewed as a political prisoner, whistle-blower or traitor.

“We’re a nation of laws. He did violate the law,” Dempsey said.

Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales has not even been charged yet–his lawyer, John Henry Browne, says the military has neither forensics nor a confession incriminating him!–but Generals are sending Browne messages wishing him the best in his defense of Bales.

Browne added that he has received hundreds of emails, including from some generals and other military figures, who wished him luck in the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I hope Browne does his best to give Bales a robust defense. And as I’ve noted repeatedly, I’m not at all convinced that the killings occurred as the military currently claims they did; if so I hope Browne proves that, too.

But I would be shocked if any generals wrote David Coombs, Bradley Manning’s lawyer, to wish him luck in defending a tough, unpopular client. Yet both men–Manning and Bales–are alleged to have violated military discipline in ways that hurt our efforts.

Update: Fixed my misspelling of Bales’ name.

As Fraud History Emerges for Bales, US Pushes FISA Court as Ideal for Afghan Night Raid Approval

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The background for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the suspect in the mass killing of civilians in Afghanistan last week, became much murkier with the revelation that his career as an investment manager ended in a judgment of $1.4 million against him for fraud. He was accused of “churning” a client’s retirement account, selling off holdings in safer investments to purchase more volatile penny stocks. In the meantime, the fallout from the attack continues, as the US continues its effort to reach a SOFA agreement with Afghanistan ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago scheduled for May. The latest offering appears to be establishment of a system in which Afghan judges would be put into position to approve “warrants” before night raids take place. Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough took to the airwaves on NPR this morning to hold up the US FISA court as the shining example on which the Afghan system should be modeled.

In this morning’s Washington Post, we get quite a few details on the fraud case against Bales. The former client, Gary Liebschner, had employed the firm Bales worked for to manage his retirement account:

That is not the man that Liebschner said he dealt with when Bales was much younger and listed as the “investment executive” on his retirement account. The fund held stock that Liebschner had inherited and earned during his AT&T days, as well as other investments.

/snip/

A severe reaction to medication left Liebschner hospitalized and in a rehabilitation center from November 1998 until June 1999. At the time, his wife, Janet, who took time off from her nursing job, was pressed for money to cover car and mortgage payments, as well as the cost of renovations to their home to make it wheelchair-accessible, she said.

She hadn’t previously been in charge of the couple’s finances, she said, but after she began to examine account statements, she realized that the fund had been severely depleted.

Her husband’s retirement account had nearly $700,000 in 1998, his statements show. By early 2000, the fund had about $30,000 in it.

That is an appallingly bad job of investment management, and it is easy to see how a finding of fraud was found against Bales and the firm for which he worked. A big caveat here, though, is whether Janet Liebschner withdrew funds to cover the home renovation and other expenses listed, and if so, how much was withdrawn. We don’t have the exact dates of when the account sat at about $700,000 or when it was found to be depleted, but the period of 1998 through 2000 was fairly robust for investments. Below is a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the beginning of 1998 through the end of 2000. There was a dip in mid-1998 that gave up the gains from earlier that year, but then from the fall of 1998 through the end of 2000, the market advanced by roughly 33%, from about 7500 to about 10,000: Read more →

Start a 8 Year Regional War and Set Iran’s Nukes Back 3 Years

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The headline and lead of the story everyone’s buzzing about reads,

Pentagon Finds Perils for U.S. if Israel Were to Strike Iran

A classified war simulation exercise held this month to assess the American military’s capabilities to respond to an Israeli attack on Iran forecast that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

That claim that just “hundreds” of Americans would die in a war started next door to where we’ve got 90,000 Americans deployed makes me want to see the full results and the resumés of those who did the war game.

But the headline misses one critical result of the war game.

The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America’s arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program — if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.

This regional war Israel might start? A war, presumably, akin to the Iraq war, which started 9 years ago today and only “ended” in December?

All it would do is set Iran’s nuclear program back 3 years.

No word on what this 8 year war to set Iran back 3 years would cost. But don’t worry. I’m sure it’d be as great a value as the war itself.

Claiming Over 12 Soldiers Involved in Massacre, Afghan Lawmakers Call for End of SOFA Immunity

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For the record, I don’t trust the investigation the Afghan legislators did into last week’s shooting of 16 civilians in Panjwai any more than I trust DOD’s own investigation. But it’s their country, and they’re proceeding with their results–which allege that over a dozen Americans were involved in the attack.

‘After our investigations, we came to know that the killings were not carried out by one single soldier. More than a dozen soldiers went, killed the villagers and then burnt the bodies,’ lawmaker Naheem Lalai Hameedzai told dpa.

They’re also claiming some of the women who were killed were sexually assaulted, which also seems dubious. That claim–like the claims the US has made–are made easier given that the victims have already been buried (as per Islamic custom).

The legislators are using their claims of wider involvement to call on Hamid Karzai to end the immunity US soldiers have under the Status of Forces Agreement.

‘We have passed a resolution unanimously to dissolve the military contract, and we have sent the resolution to President Karzai. He has not signed on it yet,’ Hameedzai said.

‘After the Panjwai incident, we have decided that we do not need any such contracts any more,’ he said.

Afghans have asked for a public legal proceeding in Afghanistan for the alleged murderer. But, according to reports, he was flown to the US over the weekend, while the investigations continue.

Military officials with the NATO-led international forces have said the legal status of international soldiers is regulated in the military technical agreement between Afghanistan and the international community and ‘very clearly regulates the responsibility for the legal handling of any activities of the international soldiers. ‘

As a reminder, an insistence on ending the SOFA is what got the US to withdraw from Iraq against our own wishes. So the threat to eliminate soldiers’ immunity might lead us to withdraw earlier than planned.

Ultimately, we may never have more clarity on what happened at Panjwai. As Ken Hardy noted in my last thread on this incident, by evacuating the suspect, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, to the US, the government has made it much less likely that Afghan witnesses will get to testify in the trial. Which will leave the one of at least two surveillance videos showing Bales activities, but possibly not those of others at the base.

The Other Drinking Soldiers

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In his post on our clearance for payments to Egypt, Jim noted that the key graph came 13 paragraphs into an 18 paragraph story.

Likewise, the key graph from the NYT story letting a senior American official lay out a narrative blaming the staff sergeant’s massacre of Afghan civilians on marital problems comes at the end–paragraph 22 out of 25. After the official talks about the soldier snapping due to personalized stress exacerbated when one of the soldier’s colleagues was gravely wounded the day before the attack, we finally learn where he got this information:

The senior American official said the account of the sergeant’s state of mind came from two other soldiers with whom he drank alcohol on the night of the shootings.

Particularly given reports from survivors of the massacre there was more than one soldier–and they were drunk–I find it interesting that the suspect had been drinking with at least two other soldiers that night. Add in the report that the solder had left the base twice, not just once.

An Afghan guard at the Nato base told the BBC that the soldier left the base twice. He returned at 00:30 local time (20:00 GMT) after the first trip out and was out between 02:00 and 04:00 for the second trip.

At the very least, you have to ask how the other soldiers the Staff Sergeant had been drinking with let him leave the base, twice. Particularly if they believed him to be as disturbed as they told the Senior official he was. But it also really raises questions about whether the soldier was alone when he left the base the first time (if he indeed left twice, which an AP report from yesterday appears to support as well). And it raises questions about whether the other soldiers would have their own reasons–besides the prohibited drinking–to obscure what happened.

Now consider Hamid Karzai’s complaint that the US did not cooperate with Afghans investigating the killing.

Karzai said on Friday that the delegation he sent to investigate the deadly shootings of 16 Afghan civilians did not receive the cooperation the Afghans expected from American officials.

Read more →

Karzai, Taliban Begin Angling for Afghanistan Dominance, Confirming Failure of US Mission

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The Ides of March has not been kind to the US mission in Afghanistan. Despite Barack Obama and David Cameron putting their best spin on the situation yesterday and claiming that NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will not be accelerated by the recent atrocities perpetrated by US forces, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban both took moves today indicating that they are now angling for dominance in an Afghanistan that is soon to be rid of occupation by western troops. These moves by Karzai and the Taliban appear to me to be signalling that they independently have come to the conclusion that the COIN strategy of “training” Afghan security forces to take over by 2014 as NATO forces are drawn down is no longer viable.

Karzai’s move is to call for western troops to withdraw from their smaller operating outposts in villages back onto large bases. From the Washington Post:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded Thursday that the United States pull back from combat outposts and confine its troops to military bases, an apparent response to Sunday’s shooting rampage by a U.S. staff sergeant.

/snip/

Foreign troops in Afghanistan must withdraw from village outposts and return to large NATO bases, the president’s statement said. Karzai also said he wants Afghan troops to assume primary responsibility for security nationwide by the end of next year, ahead of the time frame U.S. commanders have endorsed.

The Post then goes on to play into the hands of the Taliban (see below) by painting Karzai as powerless to affect US actions in Afghanistan:

Karzai does not have the authority to enforce a pullback of foreign troops, however. And the United States has rebuffed previous demands that it halt night raids, ban private security companies and immediately transfer control of prisons to the Afghan government.

Virtually simultaneously with Karzai’s demand for withdrawal from villages, the Taliban announced that they have ended their preliminary talks with the US that many hoped would lead to a negotiated end to hostilities in Afghanistan. From Reuters:

U.S. and Taliban negotiators were believed to have had preliminary contacts aimed at establishing an office for the Taliban in the Gulf state of Qatar to launch peace negotiations.

“The Islamic Emirate has decided to suspend all talks with Americans taking place in Qatar from (Thursday) onwards until the Americans clarify their stance on the issues concerned and until they show willingness in carrying out their promises instead of wasting time,” the group said in a statement.

In a clear signal that the Taliban believe US influence in Afghanistan is about to end and that they are in a struggle with Karzai’s government for future control of the country, they attacked Karzai as a US puppet. Returning to the Post article: Read more →

BAE F-35 Hack Confirmed

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I’ve long complained that the government’s obsession with WikiLeaks is badly misplaced. After all, DOD and some of its contractors simply can’t keep their networks secure from Chinese hackers. So if our chief rival can take what it wants, why worry so much that actual American citizens have access to what China can take with abandon?

Case in point. The Australian has confirmed what was initially reported three years ago: China hacked BAE to steal performance information on the F-35.

CHINESE spies hacked into computers belonging to BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence company, to steal details about the design, performance and electronic systems of the West’s latest fighter jet, senior security figures have disclosed.

The Chinese exploited vulnerabilities in BAE’s computer defences to steal vast amounts of data on the $300 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a multinational project to create a plane that will give the West air supremacy for years to come, according to the sources.

[snip]

One of those present said: “The BAE man said that for 18 months, Chinese cyber attacks had taken place against BAE and had managed to get hold of plans of one of its latest fighters.”

This plane will have taken more than $385 billion to develop and will take $1 trillion to sustain. It is the most expensive weapons system in history. And yet for 18 months, the Chinese were just living on (at least) BAE’s networks taking what they wanted. How much of the considerable cost and rework on this program comes from the data on it China has stolen along the way?

In fact, I’m wondering whether China isn’t borrowing from our own playbook: during the Cold War, we made Russia go bankrupt by engaging in an arms race it couldn’t afford. China doesn’t need to do that. By hacking our data, they can just make us go bankrupt by setting up an arms race between our contractors and its hackers. With the result that we build a trillion dollar plane that it can already exploit.

And yet the government’s priority seems to be shutting up leakers who reveal its crimes, not networks that reveal our biggest military secrets.

DOD Preparing to Admit Afghan Massacre Soldier Was Drunk

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DOD appears to be preparing to admit one of two critical details Afghan witnesses to this weekend’s massacre have maintained from the start: that the shooter(s) was drunk (villager witnesses also said more than one soldier was involved). At least, that’s what I conclude by the anonymous leak to DOD’s favorite mouthpiece, Barbara Starr.

The military is investigating whether alcohol was a factor in the rampage , two senior military officials tell CNN.  One of the senior military officials said alcohol was found on the base in the area where the suspect lived.  It is not clear yet if the alcohol belonged to the soldier and a toxic screening was conducted but the results have not been returned, the official said.

Yet even as the story gets worse, I worry that DOD will aim to cover up the worst parts of it. Starr’s sources are already citing the burial of the bodies (as per Islamic custom) when addressing evidentiary issues).

A U.S. official familiar with some elements of the investigation says CID investigators have “recovered some initial evidence” from the scene, including shell casings.  [snip]

“Ballistics is not going to be a problem,” the official told CNN.

While officials are likely to be able to recover much of this material, all the victims have been buried and permission to exhume the bodies is unlikely the official said.

And they’re also talking about forwarding recommendations up the chain of command.

After the CID completes its investigation, investigators will forward their findings up the chain of command, and military officials “will then make judicial process decisions,” according to Kirby.

Starr does answer one question I’ve seen increasingly asked: why DOD hasn’t released the Staff Sergeant’s name. They won’t do so, apparently, until he is charged.

Rumored Satellite Imagery of Parchin “Clean-Up” Fails to Materialize, Claim Debunked

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Back on March 7, AP’s Vienna correspondent George Jahn wrote that two diplomats, described as “nuclear experts accredited to the International Atomic Energy Agency” informed him that they had seen satellite imagery showing evidence of Iran trying to clean the disputed Parchin site of presumed radioactive contamination arising from work to develop a neutron trigger for a nuclear weapon. Writing yesterday for IPS News, Gareth Porter debunked Jahn’s claims. Porter’s conclusions are buttressed by the fact that David Albright’s ISIS, which Porter notes has published satellite imagery of the Parchin site since 2004 in its efforts to prove Iran is working on a nuclear weapon, has not published any imagery relating to the “clean-up” claims.

Jahn’s March 7 piece opens bluntly:

Satellite images of an Iranian military facility appear to show trucks and earth-moving vehicles at the site, indicating an attempted cleanup of radioactive traces possibly left by tests of a nuclear-weapon trigger, diplomats told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

But a bit later, Jahn does admit not all the “diplomats” he spoke to agreed on what the photos revealed:

Two of the diplomats said the crews at the Parchin military site may be trying to erase evidence of tests of a small experimental neutron device used to set off a nuclear explosion. A third diplomat could not confirm that but said any attempt to trigger a so-called neutron initiator could only be in the context of trying to develop nuclear arms.

One major problem with taking the tack of accusing Iran of trying to develop a neutron trigger is that until now, the loudest accusations relating to the Parchin site have centered around development of a high-explosives based trigger.  See, for example, this post where I discuss claims from Benjamin Netanyahu, David Albright and Joby Warrick that high explosives work was aimed at a trigger rather than production of nanodiamonds.

But another huge problem with the claim of Iran trying to clean the site is the impossibility of clean-up itself. Jahn even inadvertently gives us a clue:

Iran has previously attempted to clean up sites considered suspicious by world powers worried about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Iran razed the Lavizan Shian complex in northern Iran before allowing IAEA inspectors to visit the suspected repository of military procured equipment that could be used in a nuclear weapons program. Tehran said the site had been demolished to make way for a park, but inspectors who subsequently came to the site five years ago found traces of uranium enriched to or near the level used in making the core of nuclear warheads.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry clearly explained that such evidence cannot be completely removed : Read more →