I hope everyone’s enjoying the squabbling over earmarks. Because between this guy idly undermining Afghan support for the new strategy, the horrific persecution of Christians by resurgent jihadis in Iraq, and the smoking political volcano that’s about to erupt in Lebanon, foreign policy’s about to make a big comeback in the U.S. priority set.
“The time has come to reduce military operations,” Karzai said. “The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan . . . to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life.”…
Karzai has long been publicly critical of civilian casualties at the hands of U.S. and NATO troops and has repeatedly called for curtailing night raids into Afghan homes. Under Petraeus and his predecessor, such raids by U.S. Special Operations troops have increased sharply, to about 200 a month, or six times the number being carried out 18 months ago, said a senior NATO military official, who requested anonymity so that he could speak candidly about the situation. These operations capture or kill their target 50 to 60 percent of the time, the official said…
But Karzai was emphatic that U.S. troops must cease such operations, which he said violate the sanctity of Afghan homes and incite more people to join the insurgency. A senior Afghan official said that Karzai has repeatedly criticized the raids in meetings with Petraeus and that he is seeking veto power over the operations. The Afghan government does not have the type of legal arrangement that the Iraqi government has with U.S. forces to approve particular military operations.
“The raids are a problem always. They were a problem then, they are a problem now. They have to go away,” Karzai said. “The Afghan people don’t like these raids, if there is any raid it has to be done by the Afghan government within the Afghan laws. This is a continuing disagreement between us.”
According to a Times piece last month, in just three months Special Ops used raids to capture 300 midlevel Taliban commanders, 800 foot soldiers, and 2,000 other insurgents. Petraeus and McChrystal used the same strategy in Iraq to cripple Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent outfits there, which helped calm things after the surge. The goal in Afghanistan is to use the raids and a massive escalation of airstrikes to effectively break the Taliban’s legs and force them to sue for peace. Which is why … it seems insane that Karzai would be trying to rally public opposition to it. In fact, when I first read the WaPo piece, I thought maybe this was some sort of calculated statement coordinated with Petraeus and NATO to bolster Karzai’s domestic support and increase the government’s legitimacy. Except that doesn’t really make sense: If Karzai were triangulating here, pandering to the public on the one hand while trying to protect U.S. military ops against the Taliban on the other, he would have picked some ancillary, relatively unimportant aspect of Petraeus’s strategy to criticize. Instead he went right at the guts of it. No wonder Lindsey Graham, who’d recently been briefed about the effectiveness of the night raids, is shocked. And Petraeus, apparently, is so angry that he’s hint-hinting in meetings with Afghan leaders about resigning if it happens again:
Officials said Petraeus expressed “astonishment and disappointment” with Karzai’s call, in a Saturday interview with The Washington Post, to “reduce military operations” and end U.S. Special Operations raids in southern Afghanistan that coalition officials said have killed or captured hundreds of Taliban commanders in recent months…
Petraeus “never actually threatened resignation,” but his comments to Ghani reflected his desire to ensure that the Afghans understood the seriousness of the situation, a senior NATO military official said.
“We’ve been [subsequently] assured that President Karzai is fully supportive of the joint strategy, that we share the desire for Afghan forces to take the lead, and that we’ve worked hard together to address all the issues over which [Karzai] raised concerns and will continue to do so,” the official said…
“It’s pretty clear that you no longer have a reliable partner in Kabul,” [a NATO] official added. “I think we tried to paper it over with [Karzai’s] Washington visit” in May. “But the wheels have becoming looser and looser . . . since that.”
Actually, Karzai’s unreliability was “pretty clear” five months ago, after two of his ministers resigned when he darkly suggested that a Taliban rocket attack might have been carried out by, er, the U.S. What makes all this doubly insane is that Obama’s begun inching away from next summer’s withdrawal start date in favor of a target end date in 2014 precisely because he wants to show the Taliban — and Pakistan, natch — that there’s no sense trying to wait us out, that their only hope for relief from Petraeus’s offensive is to come to the table. And yet, here’s Karzai singlehandedly trying to destroy that leverage by galvanizing public opinion against the offensive. Whether this is a simple (or not so simple) matter of him being a loose cannon who doesn’t think strategically before he speaks or whether something more sinister’s going on, with Karzai trying to ingratiate himself with the Taliban by “balancing” them against the U.S., I don’t know. But since we’re going to be there another three years in a combat capacity and then who knows how long after that as “advisors,” one of the items on the GOP’s new oversight agenda should be an assessment of post-American leadership in Afghanistan. No one, I think, seriously believes that this guy is going to hold it together after we draw down. Is there anyone else? Or is this mission now “kill as many bad guys as possible and then hope for the best”?
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