Present U.S. Troop Levels in Afghanistan to be Maintained (Likely for the Foreseeable Future): It's All About Those Drone Bases

The Ashraf Ghani stories continue to roll out. The president of Afghanistan is in the United States for another few days. Today he'll address a joint session of Congress, and then tomorrow he's off to New York and the United Nations. So we'll be treated to several more articles before the "Ralph Nader of Afghanistan" returns to Kabul.

None will be bigger than today's frontpager by Michael Shear and Mark Mazzetti, "U.S. to Delay Pullout of Troops From Afghanistan to Aid Strikes." Weeks of Obama administration off-the-record comments buttressed a campaign of "public diplomacy" designed for yesterday's POTUS announcement that the United States will be keeping troop levels for Afghanistan at 10,000:

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s decision to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan through 2015 is partly designed to bolster American counterterrorism efforts in that country, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to conduct secret drone strikes and other paramilitary operations from United States military bases, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama on Tuesday announced that he would leave 9,800 American troops in Afghanistan until at least the end of the year. The announcement came after a daylong White House meeting with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan. The two men said the decision was a necessary response to the expected springtime resurgence of Taliban aggression and the need to give more training to the struggling Afghan security forces.

The issue here is the same one I mentioned last year -- the necessity of maintaining drone bases:

But two American officials said that a significant part of the deliberations on the pace of the withdrawal had been focused on the need for the C.I.A. and military special operations forces to operate out of two large military bases: Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan and a base in Jalalabad, the biggest city in the country’s east. Reducing the military force by half from its current level, as planned, would have meant closing the bases and relocating many of the C.I.A.’s personnel and its contractors.

Jalalabad has been the primary base used by the C.I.A. to conduct drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The drone operations were relocated there after the Pakistani government kicked the C.I.A. out of an air base inside Pakistan. The pace of drone strikes there has declined significantly since the peak during the early years of the Obama administration, but intelligence officials have lobbied to keep enough of a military presence in Afghanistan to allow the drone program to continue.

“The intelligence community sees around 10,000 troops as a key baseline to keep counterterrorism operations going in the country,” said one American official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations in Afghanistan.

A threat of Islamic State jihadis is being invoked to maintain U.S. troop levels:

The resilience of Al Qaeda in the mountains that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has surprised many American officials, and there are fears that the Islamic State could gain a foothold in the Afghan conflict. Mr. Ghani has repeatedly raised the specter of the Islamic State in comments ahead of his trip to Washington and during his visit.

Obama has said that by the end of his presidency there will only be 1,000 U.S. troops left in Afghanistan to guard the embassy in Kabul. Don't count on it. Whoever wins the White House will favor a maintenance of the drone bases in Jalalabad and Kandahar -- the collapse of the Iraqi Army last summer is front and center in the thoughts of Pentagon and State Department planners -- which will require backtracking on Obama's pledge.

What is interesting in all this is how the "Peace President" has presided over a transition to a "new normal" of perpetual war. It is now broadly accepted, if not stated, that the United States will be in a state of constant warfare -- fighting the proxies of official allies like Saudi Arabia, a monarchy that supports global jihad, and official foes like Iran and Syria (while working with them at the same time to keep the jihadis at bay).

This new normal is not going to play well with the American electorate who likes to be assured that peace is at the very least a policy aspiration. But the opinion of the American electorate is beside the point. The billionaires call the shots now. Voter turnout will continue to drop. Qualifications for voting will increase. Ten years from now the bad shape we are presently in could look pretty rosy.

Despite Scare Headlines, Expect U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Post-2014

It is not easy to interpret what is going on in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai, the post-9/11 quisling of the West, has been engaged in a prolonged, nasty squabble with his paymasters. Just yesterday the New York Times published a frontpage blockbuster, "Karzai Arranged Secret Contacts With the Taliban," that was really more smoke than fire. All reporters Azam Ahmed and Matthew Rosenberg came up with is that Karzai had tentative, unproductive talks at the end of last year with the Taliban, and that no deal is currently on the table:

But other Afghan and Western officials said that the contacts had fizzled, and that whatever the Taliban may have intended at the outset, they no longer had any intention of negotiating with the Afghan government. They said that top Afghan officials had met with influential Taliban leaders in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent weeks, and were told that any prospects of a peace deal were now gone.

But reading Ahmed and Rosenberg is fruitful in that it reminded me of something that I had already forgotten -- the United States itself was negotiating with the Taliban:

The only known genuine negotiating channel to those leaders [with connections to Mullah Omar] was developed by American and German diplomats, who spent roughly two years trying to open peace talks in Qatar. The diplomats repeatedly found themselves incurring the wrath of Mr. Karzai, who saw the effort as an attempt to circumvent him; he tried behind the scenes to undercut it. 

Then, when an American diplomatic push led to the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar, Mr. Karzai lashed out publicly at the United States. Afghan officials said that to them, the office looked far too much like the embassy of a government-in-exile, with its own flag and a nameplate reading “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Within days, the Qatar initiative stalled, and Mr. Karzai was fuming at what he saw as a plot by the United States to cut its own deal with Pakistan and the Taliban without him. 

In the wake of the failure in Qatar, Afghan officials redoubled their efforts to open their own channel to Mullah Omar, and by late autumn, Mr. Karzai apparently believed those efforts were succeeding. Some senior Afghan officials say they did not share his confidence, and their doubts were shared by American officials in Kabul and Washington.

Something is happening here and what it is ain't exactly clear. As good a place as any to start, just in terms of the basics, is today's story by Peter Baker and Matthew Rosenberg, "Old Tensions Resurface in Debate Over U.S. Role in Post-2014 Afghanistan." Yesterday Obama met in the White House for a powwow on Afghanistan with his top military brass:

As part of his review, Mr. Obama met Tuesday with Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the general’s vice chairman, Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr.; Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., commander of American and allied forces in Afghanistan; Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the United States Central Command; and Adm. William H. McRaven, head of the United States Special Operations Command.

Afghanistan will have a presidential election in April. What I don't understand about all the jockeying of Karzai by the Obama administration is why not wait to cut a deal with his successor? Probably because any successor to Karzai will be as tough or tougher when it comes to negotiating a bilateral security agreement (BSA) with the United States.

Right now there are some 55,500 Western troops in Afghanistan, 36,500 of which are American.

Post-2014, NATO is planning for a force of 8,000 to 12,000, made up of two-thirds Americans; the U.S. wants to keep a force of 10,000, with an additional 5,000 troops made up of foreign forces.

The United States wants a BSA that includes the usual status of forces agreement (SOFA) immunity guarantee as well as the right to continue its terror-inducing practice of raiding private residences. Karzai has flip-flopped on signing the BSA and threatened to bargain a deal solely with NATO. The U.S. military is allegedly pressuring Obama into an all or nothing posture, "Give us want we want, Karzai, or we will pull all our troops out of country."

As a sign that Uncle Sam is serious, Congress has already cut development aid to Afghanistan in half to $1.2 billion, with the remaining money threatened if Karzai goes ahead with the release of 37 suspected Taliban detainees.

We know that Karzai has plenty of leverage. Pakistan is a huge national security issue for the U.S. The CIA drone bases in Afghanistan are prized for their ability to project power into and eavesdrop on a nuclear-armed Pakistan that also harbors Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership.

Regardless of the U.S. tough talk of a "zero option," Obama is not about to give up those drone bases. Karzai knows this. He knows he can't lose, no matter how much he angers his bosses in Congress and the White House. He is playing with house money.

Despite all the distracting scare headlines, expect a deal to be brokered that keeps U.S. troops in Afghanistan post-2014. Those drones will continue to fly east to Pakistan.

CIA Drone Base in the Land of Mecca and Medina

In case you missed it, because it was easy to do, last Tuesday there was a great piece written by Tom Engelhardt and posted on his web site, TomDispatch.com.  Titled "Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve," it tells how the media at the behest of the Obama administration sat for over a year on the story that a secret CIA drone facility had been established on Saudi Arabian soil:

Last Tuesday [two weeks ago, February 5], the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by “an informal arrangement” agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation.

According to the Post, approximately two years ago, the CIA got permission from the Saudi government to build one of its growing empire of drone bases in a distant desert region of that kingdom. The purpose was to pursue an already ongoing air war in neighboring Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. 

The first drone mission from that base seems to have taken off on September 30, 2011, and killed American citizen and al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki. Many more lethal missions have evidently been flown from it since, most or all directed at Yemen in a campaign that notoriously seems to be creating more angry Yemenis and terror recruits than it’s killing. So that’s the story you waited an extra year to hear from our watchdog press (though for news jockeys, the existence of the base was indeed mentioned in the interim by numerous media outlets).

Engelhardt then proceeds to provide an excellent thumbnail sketch -- his article is worth reading just for this -- of our involvement with Osama bin Laden in bloodying the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan; and from there our first war with Saddam Hussein that led to a U.S. military presence in the Muslim holy land of Mecca and Medina; thereby creating the main rationale for al-Queda's 9/11 attack. One notable accomplishment of Bush's 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq is that it led to the withdrawal of combat troops from Saudi Arabia. But now, after enormous amounts of blood and treasure, we're back. As Engelhardt says,

And so we reach this moment and the news of that two-year-old secret Saudi drone base. You might ask yourself, given the previous history of U.S. bases in that country, why the CIA or any administration would entertain the idea of opening a new U.S. outpost there. Evidently, it’s the equivalent of catnip for cats; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

We don’t, of course, know whether they blanked out on recent history or simply dismissed it out of hand, but we do know that once again garrisoning Saudi Arabia seemed too alluring to resist. Without a Saudi base, how could they conveniently strike al-Qaeda wannabes in a neighboring land they were already attacking from the air? And if they weren't to concentrate every last bit of drone power on taking out al-Qaeda types (and civilians) in Yemen, one of the more resource-poor and poverty-stricken places on the planet? Why, the next thing you know, al-Qaeda might indeed be ruling a Middle Eastern Caliphate. And after that, who knows? The world? 

Honestly, could there have been a stupider gamble to take (again)? This is the sort of thing that helps you understand why conspiracy theories get started -- because people in the everyday world just can’t accept that, in Washington, dumb and then dumber is the order of the day. 

When it comes to that “secret” Saudi base, if truth be told, it does look like a conspiracy -- of stupidity. After all, the CIA pushed for and built that base; the White House clearly accepted it as a fine idea. An informal network of key media sources agreed that it really wasn’t worth the bother to tell the American people just how stupidly their government was acting. (The managing editor of the New York Times explained its suppression by labeling the story nothing more than "a footnote.") And last week, at the public part of the Brennan nomination hearings, none of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community with what little oversight they get, thought it appropriate to ask a single question about the Saudi base, then in the news. 

The story was once again buried. Silence reigned. If, in the future, blowback does occur, thanks to the decision to build and use that base, Americans won’t make the connection. How could they? 

It all sounds so familiar to me. Doesn’t it to you? Shouldn’t it to Washington?

To get a feeling why the Obama administration is engaging in what seems so obviously a retrograde geopolitical move read yesterday's article by Robert Worth on the current state of affairs in Yemen. To summarize quickly, it's a mess. If not a "failed state," in national security parlance, then certainly a state close to coming apart. The south, which as recently as 1990 was its own state, is moving towards independence.

Some progress has been made. A military campaign last year recaptured several southern towns from the jihadist militants who had controlled them for more than a year. But most of the fighters seem to have melted back into the population, and in the wake of the military’s withdrawal, large areas of the south remain a checkerboard of mysterious armed groups with no government presence. 

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate has adopted a new tactic: a ruthless campaign of assassinations that has left 74 military and intelligence officers dead since the start of last year, according to Interior Ministry officials. Almost all of the killings have been carried out by masked gunmen on motorcycles — often with pistols equipped with silencers — and only a few suspects have been arrested.

The new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is weak. He's a southerner who is reviled in the south; a man without an independent base of support in a tribal society. On top of all of this -- a weak chief executive, a secessionist movement, a surging al-Qaeda -- there is a burgeoning proxy sectarian war:

Another rising threat is the growth of an increasingly violent and sectarian confrontation between two of Yemen’s largest political groups. One of those groups, known as the Houthi movement, is led by radical adherents of a variant of Shiite Islam and has been accused of receiving support from Iran. Its followers have clashed repeatedly with youths from Islah, Yemen’s main Sunni Islamist party and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

This conflict has taken on aspects of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia — which supports Islah — and Iran, with troubling Sunni-Shiite overtones. The Houthis have grown increasingly strident, holding vast public rallies modeled after those of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement. The two groups regularly malign each other in sectarian terms — a new occurrence in Yemen — and on several occasions, rallies have devolved into rock-throwing and even gun battles between members of the two camps.

So all the ingredients are there for a failed state and anarchy and chaos. And you can tell what the Obama administration is thinking, since its answer to all sources of turbulence in the Muslim world is the drone, "Let's get a base close to Yemen so we can bomb it when it all goes to hell." What are the lessons of history compared to a clear flight path for a bombing run?

While not totally apposite here, why not Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom on "Jah Warriors"?