Two points here:

1) Just because something is in the Wikileaks
documents does not mean that it is true. It means
that it was the perception of the US military at
the time, quite possibly faulty.

2) As the Pakistanis are pointing out, Hamid Gul
has been retired for twenty years, long before the
events of the Wikileaks documents. He was active
in the events of the end of the Soviet occupation,
a time when contacts with the Taliban-Mujahidin
people were appreciated. He is also known as the
extreme end of the spectrum, not a typical example
to cite. Evidently retired people are capable of
acting, though they more often advise.

Personally, I am quite open on the question, I
don't know what the truth is, but the Pakistanis
do have a point.

alexno -- it's always good to be skeptical. appreciate your
thoughtful counter points. i have spoken to more than Hamid Gul
of course. My piece mentions speaking to other Pakistan generals
above. Have also spoken to Kayani who makes the counter case as
you might suspect. But at this point, I'll stick to my course that it's
very difficult -- perhaps impossible -- in the near to mid term for
Pakistan to forego the strategic benefits of having the Taliban in its
orbit. My sense is that in the long run we will never be rid of the
Taliban for this reason -- and thus need to stop demonizing them.
A deal with Pakistan may be possible for some sort of hybrid state,
part Karzai/part Taliban -- but based on withdrawal of US troops.
We'll see.

"My sense is that in the long run we will never be rid of the
Taliban for this reason -- and thus need to stop demonizing them.
A deal with Pakistan may be possible for some sort of hybrid state, " (Steve Clemons)

Isn't that exactly what Pakistan tried in the Swat Valley? How did that work out for them?

My problem with this, Steve, is that you seem to want to deal with radical Islamists by replacing "demonizing" with whitewashing. Unfortunately, you cannot get rid of their ideology and its effects by pretending they don't exist. If the Taliban truly believe that Allah has ordered them to win at any cost, and deals are only made to be broken as soon as possible, you won't be able to make a deal with them anymore than Pakistanis could.

Interesting guy

Gul said that he routinely confronts American journalists about why they do not probe into 9/11, and that they respond by telling Gul that the Patriot Act gets in the way and they are “not supposed to ask such questions”.

Gul said that as a result of 9/11 “everything has gone wrong with the world” and the motive behind the events being staged were largely geopolitical, and were used to exploit a window of opportunity for the U.S. to go into strategic areas where there was no U.S. presence before, as well as beating China in dominating the energy tap of the world, the middle east and south Asia.

Gul joins a raft of former government officials and intelligence heads in questioning 9/11...

http://www.infowars.com/ex-isi-chief-gul-exposes-911-inside-job/

Afghanistan has the wherewithal to be a stable, prosperous state -- not a nation, of course, but nations were never the only and, maybe, not the main form of political economy and military power today.

Bactria is like Switzerland: the German/French/Italian and Protestant/Evangelical/Catholic Confederatio Helvetica, to wit, in the middle of Russian, Chinese, Persian, Indian (nuclear) rivalries generally but not a willing party to any of those conflicts.

There are old Pathan/Punjabi conflicts over the Durand line in particular. There is also that oil field that prompted drawing the Durand line, in the first place, and that, during the 1950's, funded Punjabi as military domination of the Pasthun and, for a time, the Bengali.

We can and should restore Afghans' traditional ability to make their homelands -- valley by valley -- not worth great or minor outside powers messing with. We can do it with a "small military footprint" and proficient diplomacy.

But, we surely cannot do that by protecting remnants of the British Plutocracy (BP) here and abroad; by using foreign wars to protect agro-military pork piled up by DoD and the HASC/SASC before 9-11; or by using domestic fear-mongering to promote the suburban real-estate bubble piled up by DHS and the NSA/DNI kludge after 9-11.

We cannot prevail in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Waziristan or, for that matter, Louisiana, Texas, and the Trans-Nueces when collusive bargaining among the plutocrats of BoWash and Londinium proceeds without regard to strategy or logistics or even basic arithmetic -- oblivious to everything but the inflated incomes and precious lifestyles or our ruling elite: Not "imperialists", not "capitalists", just "Radical" or "Union" Whigs.

Three months ago:
"The battle for Kandahar has become the make-or-break offensive of the eight and-half-year war."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/world/asia/26kandahar.html

Friday:
"Gen David Petraeus, the new US commander in Afghanistan, has scrapped his predecessor's plan to secure the southern
city of Kandahar."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7907186/Gen-Petraeus-
scraps-McChrystals-plan-to-take-Kandahar.html

--bks

Let's look at the geopolitics involved. The US has cozied up to Pakistan's arch-enemy India, a country which is much more populous and has a much greater economy than Pakistan, plus India spends almost ten times as much on its military. So Pakistan is concerned.

While the US has offered assistance to India to expand their nuclear power plants, the US is fighting the China sale of two civil nuclear reactors to Pakistan. China has been a long-time friend of Pakistan.

India, for its part, is concerned that the military aid being supplied to Pakistan in the name of the global war on terrorism would be "misused'' against India.

India is a presence in Afghanistan, which brackets Pakistan on the other (west) side from India. India has a growing economic and political influence in Afghanistan. General Petraeus said recently: "India has a legitimate interest in this region without question as do others if you want to extend it further."

These put-downs have naturally angered Pakistan, the traditional power there. Pakistan has to be prepared for the announced withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and it doesn't want to be outflanked by India. Pakistan has to retain some control in Afghanistan. With the Taliban still in de facto control of most of Afghanistan, and a weak, corrupt central government, Pakistan's national interest is clear.

The problem, of course, is that Pakistan's national interest is diametrically opposed to the US (official) national interest, which nevertheless didn't keep President Obama from making Pakistan the third leg of his most recent new AfPak strategy: "Third, we will act with the full recognition that our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan." And this guy is supposed to be smart?

Afghanistan war logs: tensions increase after revelation of more leaked files

• Coalition commanders hid civilian deaths, war logs reveal
• US, Afghanistan and Pakistan trade angry accusations
• Leak poses 'very real threat' to US forces - White House

The Guardian, Tuesday 27 July 2010 - David Leigh and Matthew Taylor

Tensions between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan were further strained today after the leak of thousands of military documents about the Afghan war.

As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue.

Further disclosures reveal more evidence of attempts by coalition commanders to cover up civilian casualties in the conflict.

The details emerge from more than 90,000 secret US military files, covering six years of the war, which caused a worldwide uproar when they were leaked yesterday.

The war logs show how a group of US marines who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007 recorded false information about the incident, in which they killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded a further 50.

In another case that year, the logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died.

Other files in the secret archive reveal:

• Coalition commanders received numerous intelligence reports about the whereabouts and activity of Osama bin Laden between 2004 and 2009, even though the CIA chief has said there has been no precise information about the al-Qaida leader since 2003.

• The hopelessly ineffective attempts of US troops to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans.

• How a notorious criminal was appointed chief of police in the south-western province of Farrah.

Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London yesterday, Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, the website which initially published the war logs, said: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."

Four days after it was first approached by the Guardian, the British Ministry of Defence said it was still unable to give an account of two questionable clusters of civilian shootings by British troops detailed in the American logs.

They were alleged to have taken place in Kabul in a month in 2007 when a detachment of the Coldstream Guards was patrolling, and in the southern province of Helmand during a six-month tour of duty by Royal Marine commandos at the end of 2008. The MoD said: "We are currently examining our records to establish the facts in the alleged civilian casualty incidents raised."

The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that the leaked documents could "poison the atmosphere in Afghanistan" but at the same time insisted they would not affect British troops:

Writing in the Guardian, Eric Joyce, a former soldier and parliamentary aide to the former Labour defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, described the leaked documents as a "game changer", adding that some of the questions raised were "stunning in their enormity".

The former Liberal Democrat leader and spokesman on defence and foreign affairs, Sir Menzies Campbell, said the documents showed how difficult it would be for UK troops to leave Afghanistan in 2015, the date set by David Cameron.

"The leaked documents show just how awesome the task will be to bring the Afghan police and army to a condition where they can be responsible for security," said Campbell.

Amnesty International called for reforms to the recording of civilian casualties after a row broke out over an incident in which the Afghan government says 45 villagers were killed in a rocket attack. The coalition disputes that it was responsible. Amnesty called on Nato "to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan".

Daniel Ellsberg compared the publication of the war logs to the Pentagon Papers, which he leaked to the New York Times in 1971. "The Pentagon Papers did not stop or even affect the war but affected public opinion a great deal. Are we really going to do better with another $300bn [spent on the war in Afghanistan] on more bombs, more special forces, more drones? The Taliban are not going to quit."

The director of the military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, Professor Michael Clarke, said in London: "There is no doubt that the leaks are politically pretty damaging. The papers give an impression of a lack of military discrimination in how operations were conducted."

The Pentagon said it was conducting an investigation into whether information in the logs placed coalition forces or their informants in danger.

Last night President Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, claimed the logs published by the Wikileaks website posed "a very real threat" to US forces: "It's not the content … there are names, there are operations, there are sources, all of that information out in the public domain has the potential to do harm."

The Guardian was allowed to investigate the logs for several weeks ahead of publication, along with the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel. The three have published excerpts from the documents which do not pose a risk to informants or military operations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/afghanistan-war-logs-tensions-strained

Ralph Peters puts it well, in the NY Poat: "America plays the fool in Pakistan's double game"

Peters: " The treasure trove of 91,000 classified AfPak documents posted by WikiLeaks suggests that our government's been deceiving us about Pakistan's murderous behavior. But the situation's even worse than that: Our government's been lying to itself.

"We're told that these reports are unverified, that some can be traced back to anti-Pakistani Afghan intelligence operatives, and that American eyewitness accounts are one-offs.

"Folks, I've done plenty of intelligence analysis, and here's how it works: A single report of a supposed ally's wrongdoing gets your attention, but it's regarded as an outlier until another source confirms it. After that, you actively search for further corroboration -- before you get blindsided big time.

"One report might be hearsay. But hundreds of reports of Pakistani collaboration with our Taliban and al Qaeda enemies amount to a pattern. And intelligence is about patterns.

"Our government's response to Pakistani complicity in the death of hundreds of our troops and the wounding of thousands? Send additional aid -- on top of the $6 billion recently committed -- and bills in Congress to grant special trade privileges to Pakistanis in Taliban-infested territories."

It looks increasingly like Afghanistan is nothing more than a playground for military brass and defense contractors.

Here's the script:
1) pick one of the poorest nations on earth
2) concoct a grade B Hollywood-style story about how a handful of bad guys are threatening the planet
3) go play and loot the Treasury

And corrupt politicians and the media cheer it on!

Thanks, for bring up:

"There are old Pathan/Punjabi conflicts over the Durand line in particular. "

Now THAT'S an understatement.

from a NYT lede:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/pakistans-british-drawn-borders/#more-12253

In January, Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon official, told Bill Moyers in a discussion of American strategy for fighting militants along the Afghan-Pakistan border, calling the Pashtuns who live along both sides of the Durand Line “a tribe,” can be misleading. In an interview, Mr. Sprey said:

It’s not a tribe. It’s a nation. This is 40 million people spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, who don’t even recognize that border. It’s their land. … There’s 40 million of them. That’s a nation, not a tribe. Within it are tribal groupings and so on. But they all speak the common language. And they all have a very similar, very rigid, in lots of ways very admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam. "

This is an excellent example of why i assert violence resolves little, it merely postpones the settlement of issues.

Of course the Durand line is rarely discussed, due to the tremendous complications it would raise in the US war in that area. But it is CORE to the problem. Karzai is a Pashtun (not Afghani) and they simply do not recognize the Durand line, despite the various British compromises eg NW Frontier.

mea culpa;

thanks due to John Robert BEHRMAN, for bringing up the Durand line.

Gul's comments about US aiming to create geo-strategic facts-on-the-ground (parapharsing his statements) by instrumentally using 9/11 attacks is true.

How else can you explain lack of retaliation against UAE (where there were days of celeberation for 9/11 attacks) or Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan while invading Iraq and threatening Iran?

John Robert BEHRMAN:

"Afghanistan has the wherewithal to be a stable, prosperous state".

When? What is the ETA in your opinion?

90,000 reports?

How the hell can anyone claim that they have even the beginning of a solid interpretation of what these reports all add up to? It will take months for the alleged information in these reports to be checked, tracked down, corroborated, confirmed or disconfirmed by reporters.

Not every report that is written in the field is reliable, or even competent. Not every informant whose information is included in some guy's report is on the up and up. Not every rumor who some report writer sees fit to pass along to his superiors has some basis in fact.

The fact that someone dumps hundreds of thousands of pages of alleged information on your desk does not automatically make you better informed. That's why intelligence agencies have analysts: they have to do a lot of work to shift through all this crap and distill it into something that stands up to critical tests, and is intelligible.

Best summary of the Afghan Wikileaks blowout from
the excellent Patrick Cockburn:

"Overall, the Wikileaks dossier gives the impression of theUS military machine floundering into war and only gradually realising the crippling weakness of the Afghan government. There is intermittent understanding on the ground that the presence of foreign occupation forces is itself the main recruiting sergeant of the Taliban.

Above all, the documents convey a sense of bewilderment that the US military should be making such great efforts and achieving so little.

this just in:
Representative David R. Obey, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, intends to vote against the war spending bill before the House on Tuesday, signaling a deepening split in the Democratic Party over the war in the wake of the disclosure of classified documents showing the conflict was not going as well as portrayed.

The break by Mr. Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat ostensibly responsible for the very bill he will oppose, came as fellow liberal Democrats complained that scarce federal dollars were being devoted to Afghanistan at the expense of critical needs at home.

“With all due respect,” said Representative James P. McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, “I think we need to do more nation-building here at home.”

We have 10% unemployment, and we're engaged in wishful thinking in Afghanistan.

What is the point of our being there in the first place? Radical Islamists can attack the United States from several points on the compass.

Unless we are willing to get rid of Karzai and build good government from scratch, in one of the most primitive tribal areas on earth, fractured by thirty years of war; unless we are willing to destroy Pashtu resistance on both sides of the Durand Line, and the concomitant resistance of the Pakistani military, committing the several hundreds of thousands of troops required, and thus risk the little remaining stability of the Pakistani state, then the outcome is well-nigh inescapable. What the regional powers want for Afghanistan, what the Afghans work out themselves, will determine Afghan’s future, not us. American policy may simply not be relevant, our devout wish to the contrary notwithstanding.

We can't win this one by doubling down. We can't win this one by quadrupling down. We'd have to put in ten times the resources and several decades of time, and be willing to completely redraw the social, economic, and political map of the region. And what would we have if we ever got done? Af/Pak still would be one of the more desolate human landscapes on the planet.

Instead of putting Americans to work, we are pouring national treasure into fool's errand.

Steve Clemons - "My sense is that in the long run we will never
be rid of the Taliban for this reason -- and thus need to stop
demonizing them. A deal with Pakistan may be possible for
some sort of hybrid state, part Karzai/part Taliban -- but based
on withdrawal of US troops."

I don't see how downplaying our view of the Taliban's human
rights record will make them more amenable to negotiations, if
we are on the way out of Afghanistan in any case.

The alternative is to improve the bargaining power of the
opposition. We could for example support the peoples of the
former Northern Alliance, who will almost certainly regroup to
oppose Taliban reconquest as we draw down our forces, in a
way that we might have done in the late 1990s, ie. with weapons
and satellite intelligence. This degree of aid could give these
groups more of the ability and the will to resist and thereby
make it more likely that the Taliban will compromise with them
rather than wage an extended civil war.

It will almost certainly be more practical to aid spontaneous
opposition that arises, if we still want to try to influence things
in Afghanistan, than to continue to back the Karzai regime if the
latter cannot make up for lost time over the next six to twelve
months. But of course this is to assume that we are willing to
remain involved at a distance.

Your view seems to be closer to the idea of a negotiated
outcome as a means for US disengagement altogether. The
reality is that negotiations may only be a diplomatic fig leaf to
cover our withdrawal. But if so, then to drop our view of the
Taliban's record on human rights seems gratuitous and isn't
going to affect the Taliban one way or the other.

"Your view seems to be closer to the idea of a negotiated
outcome as a means for US disengagement altogether. The
reality is that negotiations may only be a diplomatic fig leaf to
cover our withdrawal. But if so, then to drop our view of the
Taliban's record on human rights seems gratuitous and isn't
going to affect the Taliban one way or the other. " (Dave Billington)

That's a good point and could be said for a lot of the punditocracy preaching "engagement" and an "end to demonizing" with an assortment of jihadist political groups.

gul sounds like a realist... it must be shocking for some to hear a person like that...

johnh 1123am and bds 1023am - thanks - ditto on that...

dan kervick.. do you support the continued expansion of info collecting that the patriotic act seems to want to expand many times what it was less then 10 years ago? the criticism that dana priest leveled in her series in the wapo was that all this info collecting requires someone to shift thru it all and presently the coffers are swamped with info with not enough private contractors or whoever to scrutinize it... here is a good article that touches on these dynamics of collecting info but not being able to weed thru all of it in some meaningful way..

"8. I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/07/26/wikileaks_afghan.html

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?"

stupid capatcha stuff round here makes one have to try posting more then a few times and the cut and paste into another window never relays properly... good reason to skip trying to post on the washington notes comment section unfortunately...

Don Bacon, the problem with Pakistan's perceived national self-interests is that they are turning Pakistan into a failed state.

You mention that India's economy is doing much better than Pakistan's. Well, this didn't happen by chance; it happened by India turning away from socialism and encouraging business development. Now the Indian middle class is as populous as the whole United States, while Pakistan remains mainly stratified in a semi-feudal state of rich and poor.

Pakistan's choice was not to create a middle class, but to obsess over Kashmir, sponsor terrorism against India, become the planet's worst nuclear proliferator, and support the Taliban. These choices have consequences. It's not the first time, and won't be the last, that a country has been taken down the tubes by its rulers' bad but "self-interested" choices.

From a media standpoint, the interesting thing is that nobody blames Pakistan's bad choices on India like they blame similar Arab bad choices on Israel. Blaming India would be much more plausible because, as you pointed out, India really is a very large and powerful country.

But then, as far as I know, nobody has spent the last hundred years peddling the idea that everything that is wrong with the world is due to a secret cabal of Indians who control every country in the world and run the media, an idea which is a perennial favorite about the Jews; just ask Oliver Stone.

Frankly I don't care if Pakistan has three economic classes or two or seventeen, that's nobody's business but the Paks.

The important facts to know are that India and Pakistan are enemies, China and Pakistan are friends (so Pakistan won't 'fail'), and finally that Pakistan interests and US interests are diametrically opposed, causing most Pakistanis to hate the US (but take our money -- why not), which is one paramount reason to leave this part of the world where they regularly ship pallets of dollars out on aircraft to parts unknown and the idiot Americans who bring them the money don't even account for it, to say nothing of the lives that are lost in this Quixotic nine year effort to . . .what was the reason again?

this just in:
House passes war-funding bill

The 308-114 roll call Tuesday by which the House passed an almost $59 billion measure that includes funds for President Barack Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan.

Voting yes (to pass) were 148 Democrats and 160 Republicans. Voting no were 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans.

What's wrong with this picture? Obama has more friends for his war on the red side than on the blue.

. . . about time to cut Social Security benefits to finance Obama's war, eh? How can this guy get up in the morning and look in the mirror? More importantly, when will the supposed great popular dissatisfaction with politicians, politics and government in general by the American people make the connection that they are being screwed by having their pockets picked to pay for needless wars, corrupt foreign governments, and endless graft and unaccounted for billions of dollars? Their money going down the drain of waste, fraud, corruption, and supporting every defense contractor in the business -- just because -- in the world's greatest ponzi scheme. Tell me it can't go on forever.

"Frankly I don't care if Pakistan has three economic classes or two or seventeen, that's nobody's business but the Paks.

The important facts to know are that India and Pakistan are enemies, China and Pakistan are friends (so Pakistan won't 'fail'), and finally that Pakistan interests and US interests are diametrically opposed, " (Don Bacon)

So you intend to just play stupid about why Pakistan's interests are opposed to the US's and how they got that way? Naturally, the reasons for Pakistan's positions are beyond reproach, while the US's are always to blame.

The trouble with trying to make yourself stupid on an issue is that the effort usually succeeds.

Posted by DonS, Jul 27 2010, 8:06PM - Link
.
" Tell me it can't go on forever"
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

O. K..It can't go on forever.

Seriously...it really can't.

I am sure some of our elite shadow government have their not for public consumption studies on how to profit and rule in the US afterlife.

Beat the herd...Think ahead.

I wonder if a more hopeful view of Pakistan is possible. Most Pakistanis
are Barelvi Muslims, a moderate branch, and a Harvard study a few
years ago found that claims of spreading madrasa influence were
unfounded. The country does have a middle class, the percentage is
just much smaller than in India.

India is still doing better (it is for one thing a democracy). But modern
influences in Pakistan might grow if we encouraged them more
intelligently. For example, most parents there are looking for modern
education and this is something we might help older students obtain at
a nominal cost if cell phones are becoming efficient means of online
delivery. I would hope that there are ways in which we can assist
modernization that the people of Pakistan themselves actually want and
are willing up to a point to pay for.

A Taliban coalition or victory in Afghanistan could embolden Talibs in
Pakistan and Islamists there generally. The majority in Pakistan who
want to move into the modern world peacefully could have their
prospects cut short if extremist influence in the country spreads, and
terror attacks on India and the West could continue.

However, after we leave Afghanistan there is likely to be an
understanding that if another terror attack on the United States
originates in that part of the world, either we will not allow the
planners to take sanctuary in Pakistan or we will hold Pakistan
accountable if they do. In the meantime, I would hope that we can give
what assistance we can to the Pakistani people that they themselves
want and can use to build better lives.