The Globe and Mail has a story, based on a NATO report, which describes how a platoon of French soldiers advancing up a hill in Afghanistan, with high ground on three sides, were hit by snipers and RPGs and wiped out as a unit. Of the 30 French paratroopers, 10 were killed and 18 were wounded. Michael Yon, who has access to the classified NATO report, confirms the Globe and Mail article correctly reflects the report, without adding any additional details. The Globe and Mail story suggests the enemy which attacked the French received training and weaponry from sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan. “Two Western security officials said … that the attackers cannot be described as purely Taliban; they likely included fighters from the Taliban movement, but also from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar‘s Hizb-i-Islami network, and perhaps from other groups. Senior officials said they suspect the involvement of Hazrat Noor, an extremist leader from South Waziristan, in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.”
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s biography encapsulates not only the history of Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan, but also underscores the interplay of geopolitics on the fighting. Hekmatyar began his career as a leader of the Muslim Youth organization, throwing acid in the faces of women who ventured out without covering. He later fled to Pakistan where he established Hizb-i-Islami (“Islamic Party”) under the patronage of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s dad, who provided training camps in which they could sharpen their killing skills. After the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the CIA paid Hekmatyar to return to his homeland and harass the Soviets. But Hekmatyar was willing to take money from all comers provided it suited his book. Wikipedia writes that “at various times, he has both fought against and allied himself with almost every other group in Afghanistan. He ordered frequent attacks on other rival factions to weaken them in order to improve his position in the post-Soviet power vacuum.”
After alternately trying to defy and ally with the Taliban after the Soviet withdrawal, Hekmatyar lost his training camps in Pakistan to them and fled to Iran, where he remained for 6 years awaiting events. After September 11, he saw an opportunity to return and decided to join the “global Jihad” against America. In early 2002 he was reportedly forming an alliance with al-Qaeda, who probably needed help from any quarter they could get it. Once again he was back in his element. Hekmatyar is currently “thought to have at least assisted in a April 27, 2008 attempt on the life of President Karzai in Kabul … responsible for include the January 2, 2008 shooting down of a helicopter containing foreign troops in the Laghman province; the shooting and forcing down a U.S. military helicopter in the Sarubi district of Kabul on January 22; and blowing up a Kabul police vehicle in March 2008”. Now he is believed to have assisted in the deadly attack on French paratroopers.
The attack on the French illustrates how much of the fighting in Afghanistan originates from planning cells and training camps in Pakistan. None of this is news. Bill Roggio says that not only are new attacks on NATO being planned in Pakistan, it has long been suspected that the ‘next September 11’ is brewing in the Pakistani tribal areas. American commanders are caught between standing by and watching it happen or acting to prevent it and precipitating the disintegration of Pakistan.
“You might as well paint the entire Northwest Frontier Province red,” one senior military intelligence source said ….US Special Operations Forces have stepped up attacks inside Pakistan’s lawless tribal agencies in part of an effort to prevent the next major attack inside the United States, senior military and intelligence sources told The Long War Journal. …
The cross-border raids are designed to disrupt al Qaeda’s training camps and safe houses that aid in preparing for attacks against the West, sources say. The US is also targeting al Qaeda’s Taliban allies in Pakistan, such as the powerful Haqqani family in North Waziristan and the Taliban forces of Mullah Nazir in South Waziristan … in the tribal areas [who] not only facilitate attacks against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, they play a critical role in facilitating attacks against the West by providing safe havens and sponsoring camps that train foreign terrorists,” a military intelligence source said.
But the problem is not only whether UAV strikes and Special Forces raids can accomplish this goal alone, but also for how long even this limited form of disruption can continue. US strikes, amplified by hysterical reporting such as this article by Robert Fisk have generated Pakistani political demands to cut off logistical supplies to NATO. Bill Roggio writes:
US military and intelligence officials wonder how long the strikes can continue. The Pakistanis may get serious and close the Torkham and Chaman crossing points to NATO traffic for extended periods. The strikes may cause the current Pakistani government to collapse, leaving a political vacuum that can be filled with Taliban sympathizers such as Nawaz Sharif. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” one official said in desperation.
But how can Americans fight al-Qaeda in Pakistan if they are engaged in the “War in Afghanistan” or the “War in Iraq”? Al-Qaeda itself draws no such distinctions, although they are the obsession of Western politicians and journalists. Perhaps the greatest strategic error of the Bush Administration after September 11 was to subsume its campaigns under the name the “War on Terror” without explaining what this term meant. By failing to describe the relative roles of Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and Russia in the transnational terrorist phenomenon, it gave the unfortunate impression the campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and counterterror ops in numerous countries were all separate events, instead of interrelated efforts. This allowed the Left to politically delegitimize individual components of the “War on Terror” without ever acknowledging the existence of an interrelated nexus of terrorism. Obama could say he was not against all wars, just dumb ones in Iraq. As if there were a war soley for Iraq. For a time Afghanistan became the “good war” while Iraq remained “the bad war”, although that has changed lately as America’s various enemies redeploy to Afghanistan/Pakistan. But as Michael Totten writes in Commentary that they are all part of the same war.
Obama could, perhaps, argue that fewer resources were available for the fight in Afghanistan because of the war in Iraq. That would be true. But that’s also true of Al Qaeda’s resources. They also deployed manpower and material to Iraq that otherwise could have been sent to Afghanistan. … If Al Qaeda hadn’t poured all those resources into Iraq, they likely would have poured them into Afghanistan. …
Obama is rightly worried about the safe havens Al Qaeda has created in Pakistan, and it’s to his credit that he refuses to let up about it. But for years he’s been entirely blasé about the safe havens Al Qaeda created in Iraq–in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baqubah, Mosul, and parts of Baghdad. For years he has aggressively promoted a policy of abandoning the fight in that country which quite obviously would have allowed Al Qaeda to preserve those safe havens and possibly even expand them.
Events in Afghanistan both before and after the Soviet invasion; prior to and subsequent to 9/11 were heavily influenced by global events. Events in Afghanistan were a reflection of larger developments rather than a driver of them. The War on Terror is really a global fight against a complex of virulent ideologies, oil money, crime, drugs, rogue states and alliances among super-gangs. Hekmatyar’s own life illustrates this and there is no reason to think that overall success is exclusively tied to any particular geographical place name. If US forces succeed in making the Northwest Frontier Provinces too hot for al-Qaeda they will simply go elsewhere or withdraw deeper into Pakistan. The Cold War possessed a strategic coherence which the War on Terror, due to its failure to name the enemy, has so far failed to achieve. During that long struggle, nobody spoke of deterring the Statsi in East Germany or the North Vietnamese Army in Indochina. None were so foolish as to assume these were all disconnected events, as we often do with Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. It was well understood that what needed to be deterred around the Inner German Border or in Southeast Asia was the Soviet Union or China. Michael Totten described how the pulse of terror rose or fell in proportion to the perception that America would go after them wherever they hid.
Last year the Pew Research Center surveyed Muslims in 16 different countries. Support for suicide bombers has declined in nearly every country that was also surveyed in 2002, and the decline is dramatic almost everywhere. The only Muslim communities surveyed where support for suicide bombers remains at greater than 50 percent are, unsurprisingly, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
The United States could not have prudently allowed itself to yield the field to Al Qaeda in either Iraq or Afghanistan by being wholly distracted from one or the other. Both fronts were crucial for Al Qaeda, which means both were crucial for the United States. It doesn’t matter if we like the fact that we have been embroiled in a hot war with Al Qaeda in two countries at once. That’s just how it is.
The often-reviled idea that “either you are for us or against us” isn’t a newly minted brainwave proceeding from the idiotic or demented mind of George W. Bush. It is simply an overly timid restatement of the basic strategic idea of the Cold War. Adopting the correct strategy is important because without it, no number of tactical improvements can compensate for the lack of a guiding conception. The heavy casualties suffered by French paratroopers described by the Globe and Mail is already being attributed to a “lack of ammunition” or of a paucity in tactical radios. Undoubtedly those factors were important in determining the outcome on the tragic occasion. But in a very fundamental sense the French losses were the result of the operation of enemy sanctuaries in Pakistan, whose existence is in turn partly due to lack of belief in the proposition that you are “either for us or against us”. No leader in the Western World — with the exception of the tentative GWB — has conveyed this message convincingly. And what remains of this message is diluted day by day by the tireless propaganda of the Left. Eventually the sting of al-Qaeda’s defeat in Iraq will be forgotten; their boldness will return and they will reconstitute in a place which America will have no specific reason to lean on. And if from that place another 9/11 attack is mounted Robert Fisk may be among the first to say that ‘it was all our fault’. In a sense he will be right even had he the wit to realize he was pointing at a mirror which our public intellectuals have shattered into parts. The myriad reflections in that crazed reflection don’t represent different things. They represent the same confused Western society attempting to see itself through a kaleidoscope of lies.
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