“Earlier Pakistani campaigns against the Taliban do not offer an encouraging precedent. In Bajaur, a part of the tribal areas, two main economic centers, the market towns of Loe Sam and Inayat Kalay, remain in ruins nearly eight months after the army smashed them in pursuit of the Taliban and claimed victory.”

– “Taliban Losses No Sure Gains for Pakistanis,” New York Times

U.S. Tightens Airstrike Policy in Afghanistan

Pakistan Resumes Airstrikes in South Waziristan

Note that, for strategic purposes, the difference between Pakistan and Afghanistan is meaningless, and that Gen. MacChrystal was right when he told his officers last week, “Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly.”

U.S. military has massively expanded use of remote-piloted drone attacks within Pakistan since last autumn, and especially since Obama’s inauguration.

Problem: Some analysts say drone attacks are really, really bad counterinsurgency, because they leave the innocent with the guilty to die in the rubble, and grief and anger are an excellent recruiting tool for extremism. That argument is well canvassed in this piece.

But in fact, an understanding of the nasty blowback airstrikes can provoke seems to be driving some of the strategic thinking in Afghanistan. This piece says one reason Obama has sent 17,000 incremental troops to Afghanistan, and may well send more, is that more troops will “enable U.S. and allied commanders to reduce their reliance on the airstrikes and Special Forces raids that have inflicted growing civilian casualties…”

Is it possible that the efforts of all those freshly-arriving U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan could be undone by resentments fuelled by all those U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan? I doubt it’s possible to know the answer, but I still think the question is worth raising. Obama is to unveil his new Afghanistan strategy this week or next. Which is Yet Another reason why it would have been handy to have the banks fixed by now, if that were possible.

The release of the federal government’s third quarterly report on “Canada’s Engagement in Afghanistan” was, as Colleague Wherry and Colleague Geddes will tell you, the occasion for yet another news conference in which government ministers insisted on progress while the numbers suggested that security in Kandahar continues to decline. A state of affairs that brings to mind Prime Minister Harper’s remarks broadcast over the weekend:

“We’re not going to win this war just by staying,” he told interviewer Fareed Zakaria.

“Quite frankly, we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. Afghanistan has probably had – my reading of Afghanistan history (is) it’s probably had an insurgency forever of some kind.”

“What has to happen in Afghanistan is we have to have an Afghan government that is capable of managing that insurgency.”

We’re not shy in this corner about telling you when I think the PM is saying nothing honest or intelligible. But here I think he is trying to say something important but difficult to define. That’s the nature of modern counterinsurgency, and I’ve seen no better extended discussion of that set of issues than in Rupert Smith’s book The Utility of Force.

General Smith retired from the British army in 2002 after a 40-year career during which he commanded the UK Armoured Division in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the UN forces in Bosnia, British forces in Northern Ireland from 1996-99, and then as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. His book is a treatise on what he calls “war amongst the people,” which is to say, modern counterinsurgency, in which the battlespace contains large numbers of civilians and the attitudes of those civilians are crucial to determining success or failure. He starts big: “War as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.”

What’s taken its place? A less apocalyptic but subtler and more intractable kind of conflict: Smith’s “war amongst the people.” It has its own rules. Here are a few of those he outlines:

• “We fight amongst the people, a fact amplified literally and figuratively by the central role of the media: we fight in every living room in the world as well as on the streets and fields of a conflict zone.”

• “Our conflicts tend to be timeless, since we are seeking a condition, which then must be maintained until an agreement on a definitive outcome, which may take years or decades.”

• “We fight so as not to lose the force, rather than fighting by using the force at any cost to achieve the aim.”

• “The sides are mostly non-state” because, to paraphrase Smith, one side is usually a multi-national coalition and the other a highly mobile non-state actor like the Taliban and other Af-Pak insurgents.

All of this helps explain the cognitive dissonance that comes from watching conflicts like Afghanistan. “There are planes dropping precision bombs, missiles fired from hi-tech guns, soldiers in helmets and flak jackets driving round in tanks, political leaders gravely committing men to battle and underlining the importance of the venture and promising success. In short, recent conflicts have all the trappings and iconic images of industrial war, but it seems these wars are never won.” (emphasis added)

So why not? Continue…

Must-reads: Henry Aubin on the Order of Canada; Graham Thomson in Kandahar; Vaughn Palmer on BC’s emissions targets.

The pan-Canadian smorgasbord
Margaret Somerville, Omar Khadr, John McCain, Rick Salutin and a bunch of heroin addicts—together at last!

In the Montreal Gazette, Henry Aubin says controversial McGill University bioethicist Margaret Somerville’s exclusion from the Order of Canada proves the investiture committee is infected with the political correctness virus, when it should be working for a cure. From abortion to gay marriage, Quebec nationalism and even the banality of municipal politics, Aubin argues, Canadians are often subjected to the “either you’re with me on my terms, or you’re a son of a bitch” (in the words of Quebec playwright René-Daniel Dubois) mentality, the result being a lack of “sharp debate that makes for thoughtful public policies.” The OOC should “encourage the intellectual diversity that is the strength of this or any society,” he believes.

Asking the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington about Omar Khadr is normally a little like taking a sledgehammer to an aquarium—all of a sudden you’re surrounded by flopping, twitching, rapidly dying arguments, none of which have anything to do with each other except that they somehow found themselves in the same tank. To wit, he begins today: “It is now seems almost inevitable that Omar Khadr … will be returned to Canada”—which is more than a little bizarre, given the Canadian government’s repeatedly-stated indifference. In fairness, however, Worthington today eventually lands at a somewhat logical argument about Khadr: that “fighting and killing invaders” is an act of war, not a crime, and as such he should be treated as a prisoner of war until the conflict’s conclusion. This makes perfect sense if you ignore all the other “prisoners of war” released from Guantanamo, and as long as the words “child soldier” mean nothing to you.

Continue…