Naturally, such pieces are already forthcoming. One of the best I’ve seen so far comes from an expected source, Prof. Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment, although it does veer at the end to the realm of personal reminiscences. (The September 11, 2001 attacks were after all the inspiration for setting up that blog, as they were for so many other things e.g. US Army/Marines enlistments.)

Plus, as always Prof. Cole’s treatment is in English, which is not really within the remit of the blog you’re reading now. Let’s turn to Der Spiegel instead:

Osama Bin Laden: Der Terrorfürst… http://tinyurl.com/635z5g5

May 2, 2011 5:19 am via SPIEGEL ONLINEReplyRetweetFavorite

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That link leads to an article entitled The Prince of Terror, by Yassin Musharbash. (Despite the name, a born-and-bred German journalist.) The photo-series you’ll find starting at the article’s head – basically a series of Osama TV-stills – is nothing to write home about, but what Musharbash writes about his historical background is quite interesting. For the world’s premier terrorist could very well have become its leading playboy instead; he was born into quite a wealthy Saudi family, which had made its money in the construction business. But no, he chose religion over worldly things, and became known over his lifetime for his qualities of patience, modest living, and friendliness – “friendliness” to a select few, at least, since he never was so enthusiastic about Westerners and his strict religious convictions kept him from shaking any female’s hand from an early age, as well from any music, photography, or television (except for the news).

Nonetheless, from a position as an outsider he soon became one of the leading heroes within the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Of course, it was from the (mostly Arab) fighting elements he assembled there for that original purpose that he would go on to build his “Al-Qaeda” network. (The name in Arabic literally means “network,” as well as a number of other things.) But Musharbash helpfully reminds us of another, later instance when the West’s and Bin Laden’s military interests coincided, namely in Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s: A nascent Al-Qaeda then supplied fighters to defend that break-away republic from Serb depredations long before Europe or the US had made up their mind what to do themselves.

The Dutch paper De Volkskrant is also quick off the blocks with its own Profile: This is how Bin Laden became the most-wanted terrorist on Earth. No photo-series this time – but really, by now haven’t we all had to gaze on his face more times than we have really wanted? – just a Bin Laden background, with a couple new and interesting facts. Supposedly he originally started working in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there just to try to recruit for and supply the resistance, not take up arms himself, but he changed his mind one day when he happened to be attacked by some Russian helicopters. Also, although after his success there he returned to his native Saudi Arabia as a famous hero, he soon fell afoul of the authorities there by shooting his mouth off against them too often, to the point that they confiscated both his passport and much of his property. (Of course, that didn’t stop him from moving to Sudan, by way of Yemen, and thence back to Afghanistan.)

There’s just one strange thing here: the (unnamed) Volkskrant reporter writes about how, even after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden still managed to run Al-Qaeda – in a loose way – “with his satellite and computer.” I can easily imagine Bin Laden weilding a laptop (although the power-supply could have been problematic), but not a “satellite” as the world’s authorities keep careful tabs on what’s allowed up into space. Perhaps the author meant “satellite-telephone.”

                          

One way you can tell this is truly a “big story” (if ipso facto is not itself sufficient for your reasoning process) is that the weekend is not even over, yet reports of repercussions are already coming in. Here’s a piece from Trouw reporting how the governor of Uruzgan (the province in southern Afghanistan where most of the Dutch combat troops are), Asadullah Hamdam, is already getting worried and has called upon the Dutch government to change its mind. On the other hand, Afghan General Juma Gul Himat, chief of police there, says he’s willing to live with a Dutch withdrawal – for a price. He wants better training, better air support, faster economic development, and better equipment: mine-detectors, helicopters. (Ah, mon cher général – what part of “We’re outta here!” don’t you understand?)

The second half of the Trouw article deals with the issue – also covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad – of whether the Australian troops there in Afghanistan could maybe take over for the departing Dutch. Short answer: they can’t, or at least they won’t. That much the Australian foreign minister, Stephen Smith, has made clear. The Aussies do have around 1,550 troops there in Uruzgan also, with no date fixed for them to leave (although the AD article does mention that that country’s minister of defense, John Faulkner, has already expressed the wish that they be out of there soon), but they’ve got their hands full now with the reconstruction and training activities they’ve already been assigned, thank you very much indeed, mate.

But what also caught my eye was this brief piece by Tobias Müller in the the Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung over Wouter Bos, leader of the PvdA party which broke the present coalition government by, in effect, walking out of it. (All PvdA cabinet members resigned their positions.) The title of Müller’s piece translates (roughly) as “Explosive-meister of the coalition,” a reference to the blame being ascribed to Bos and his PvdA for blowing it up. But, as he astutely notes, that is mostly what Bos’ political opponents – most prominently, the politicians of the CDA and CU – want everyone to believe. An alternate view, which probably is gaining more currency, is that of Bos being the only one around willing to stick to his principles in demanding that the promised and planned end to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan go through – “showing backbone at any price,” as Müller phrases it in his article’s lede. As the author notes, Bos has done so many a time before, although usually in connection with selling something to the members of his leftist Labor Party that they didn’t really want to go for, e.g. abandoning the demand for a national referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, raising the retirement age, weakening workers’ protection against being laid off. Granted, those last two are still just proposals for discussion – but at least they are open for discussion.

The point is that it is this reputation for being a principled politician, not just out to be in the government at any price, which could well stand Wouter Bos in good stead in the campaigning-season about to open for May’s general election. (For what it’s worth – the PvdA and Wouter Bos are hardly the personal electoral preferences of this blogger.)

                          

That caustic title is actually the very same as that of a new book out by Stefan Kornelius, head of the foreign affairs department at Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The expanded list he provides of “defense-only” rules under which the German troops have to work is truly ridiculous. They may fire at targets only after they have first been attacked, and even then may not pursue those enemy forces if they should then try to flee; no night flights are allowed by either fixed-winged or helicopters – and, in any case, anything German pilots may learn up there in the way of intelligence on the enemy cannot be radioed back directly (i.e. in “real-time”), but must be debriefed only after that aircraft is back on the ground. For the rule that takes the cake I almost chose the one reading “No counter-narcotics activity; you’re not here for that,” which among other things supposedly has resulted in opium poppies for harvesting being grown right next to a German base! But no, that has to yield pride-of-place to Friederichs’ mention that German government lawyers are still filing legal complaints against soldiers who fire their weapons in self-defense when it’s not clear that the Taliban have indeed fired first!

Needless to say, morale is low, especially now that the German troops are no longer engaged in the help-the-locals development work that many of them thought was why they came – it’s too dangerous now. There’s precious little coverage back in Germany of their efforts there, as well as little in the way of medals, awards, and other such recognition. Unfortunately, their morale is likely to get much lower in the near future: the schedule of Afghan government elections coming up on 20 August, followed by a German general election on 27 September, inevitably means that attacks against them are shortly to reach a crescendo as the Taliban shrewdly try to produce more casualties and thus sap support for the troop deployment further.

Tellingly, Friederichs passes along Kornelius’ assessment that, when it comes to public treatment of Afghanistan, it’s the US under Obama that is doing things right. In Germany nobody wants to talk about the deployment over there of 3,500 troops (it’s not allowed to be called a “war”), and the government likewise has no interest in actually trying to explain to its electorate precisely why they are there in the first place, particularly with those elections coming up. In the US, in contrast, Obama is said to be willing to speak openly of “the violent task of stabilizing Afghanistan.” That’s all very interesting, given that no less than the New York Times just yesterday published a piece on how the current administration still can’t figure out how to define “winning” in Afghanistan, a persistent but vital puzzle that other writers have been covering even longer back into the past.

Ultimately, for Germany the way forward – for good or for bad – depends precisely on that double-set of elections coming up that will make life for the Bundeswehr troops there ever-more precarious. Kornelius: “If the Afghan government [that emerges] after the election makes no progress, the international troops lose their basis. Militarily Afghanistan can’t be won, living conditions for Afghans must [first] be bettered. Otherwise I hold a withdrawal of the international troops in one or two years to be realistic.” Or even sooner than that for the Bundeswehr, of course, if the Left/Green/FDP opposition manages to take over in Germany after 27 September.

                          

OK, so on second thought maybe the example of Afghanistan has little to teach the US in the realm of health care after all. Indeed, the Americans (along with the Europeans, and the World Bank) are in fact the country’s medical paymasters. Nonetheless, an inspection may still be in order (to the extent hostile conditions within the country allow) of this nascent health structure that some do regard as “a minor miracle” because of the progress it has made. Reporter Rob Vreeken of the Netherlands’ De Volkskrant has taken on the challenge, in an account he entitles Come now, this isn’t Switzerland.

It may sound strange, but it’s true: it’s foreign NGOs that run health care in Afghanistan (including a couple – HealthNet, Cordaid – that are Dutch, which accounts for De Volkskrant’s local interest). To be sure, there’s a Ministry of Health in Kabul, and these NGOs all report to it quarterly, but its main function is that of coordinating everything according to the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) master-plan for setting up that health infrastructure that the Ministry completed in 2002. This BPHS establishes what seems to be a reasonable hierarchical national structure. At the bottom of the pyramid are the “health posts” in the far-flung Afghan villages, each serviced by two “community health workers” (CHWs) who should be one male, one female (preferably a married couple). These provide basic examination and medicines, as well as referrals up to the structure’s next layer, the “basic health centers” (BHCs) in the somewhat larger villages – still not proper hospitals, but better-equipped, and with more and better personnel, to provide more expert basic care. The pyramid continues up to even-larger institutions like the proper medical centers (for some reason abbreviated as “CHCs”) in the larger cities.

That’s the way the Afghan health system is structured, at least. Understandably, though, the BPHS still falls somewhat short in practice – even though according to Vreeken the Taliban generally respect the health workers and so leave them alone when they encounter them. Then again, one important reason for that is that, really by necessity, those workers are generally native Afghanis. Yes, it’s charity NGOs who are running things (generally deployed geographically by assigned provinces), but the foreigners are to be found mostly in the higher administrative ranks, i.e. back in Kabul, with their Afghani employees actually out in the countryside.

How Ya Gonna Bring Docs Down to the Farm . . .

Unfortunately, it is rather hard to get good people. Those CHWs, for one thing, almost always don’t know what they’re doing: they are only trained in a three-week course, and in fact they work for free. As one in-country observer (Lisa Aaen of the Danish Afghanistan Comité, another NGO) notes, often a CHW who is present, and thinks s/he knows what s/he is doing, can be worse than no one present at all. Native doctors are also scarce, and even the generous pay-bonuses made available seem to have no influence in attracting these out to work in the countryside – particularly not for the female doctors, but those are especially needed out there because no Muslim will ever let his female acquaintances be examined by a male stranger, no matter what. (This also explains the prescribed one-male, one-female quota for CHWs.) No, any Afghan with medical expertise somewhat understandably prefers to set up a private practice – mostly back in Kabul – and make big money treating only those who can pay.

In addition, Afghanistan is a big country, with an extremely primitive transportation infrastructure, often meaning that that referral for your serious medical case to the next level up in the medical hierarchy – located beyond that next ridge of mountains, say – had better not be urgent. On the medicines front, those are free up to a certain level of supply, namely that which the annual plan calculates will be required, yet that amount never turns out to be enough – or the distribution is wrong – so that soon patients are asked to pay for the drugs they need.

But still . . . well, this ain’t Switzerland we’re talking about here, anyway. For all the shortcomings, there is little doubt that the situation is certainly better than what was in place before the US/NATO intervention in the country starting in late 2001, particularly when it comes to sheer citizen access to some sort of care. Whether you want to call it even a “minor miracle” must first depend upon which numbers you come to trust. The government claims that 80% of the Afghan population now has access to medical care; Ms. Aaen of the Danish Afghanistan Comité, in view of her concern over the basic incompetence of the local CHWs, thinks that figure should be closer to 20%.

                          

A report out of the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende (Hope for atomic agreement between USA and Russia, sourced to the Ritzau news-agency) largely confirms that assessment and adds further detail. For one thing, this will actually be the second time Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will discuss the subject. When they first met in London, at that G20 summit of early last April, they agreed to begin negotiations during this upcoming visit on strategic nuclear arms – which may have been somewhat of a no-brainer, as the current START-1 treaty that regulates the US-Russia strategic nuclear balance expires on 5 December of this year. In any case, it’s not like things have been quiet on this front (unfortunately); there is still that plan by the US to set up an anti-missile system in Central Europe, ostensibly aimed against Iran, with the control radar in the Czech Republic and the actual missiles in Poland, a topic which Medvedev is guaranteed to bring up into the conversations. Plus, the Russian president’s initial idea for greeting Obama’s election last November was to announce his intention to station short-range, nuclear-tipped “Iskander” missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad as a counter-move to that anti-missle system, although he has not followed through yet with the actual deployment.

But there’s another problem that the Economist article did not bring up, and that is NATO’s current difficulties with its supply line to Afghanistan. Routing provisions through Pakistan via the Khyber Pass has been a risky proposition for some time, and a few months ago it also looked like the US would be losing access to a key airbase in Kyrgyzstan, although recently the two governments signed an agreement to open it up again for American military use. Still, it would be handy also to be able to use Russian facilities – as well as Russia’s considerable influence on the Kyrgyz government – so that cooperation here would be very welcome. The BT article says American officials likewise have hopes of being able to settle this during the upcoming Russo-American summit.

                          

But things may not necessarily follow that simple script. There is certainly resistance in Germany, for example, to the idea of sending any more of its soldiers to Afghanistan, or even to allow a redeployment of the ones that are already there to areas of the country where they could be more useful in suppressing the Taliban (and so where, by definition, they would be more exposed to actually taking casualties). As for the Danes, they do already have around 550 troops operating in the more-dangerous south part of the country and have suffered 22 killed-in-action since the Danish military’s initial deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. And now we encounter on the pages of Denmark’s leading commentary newspaper, Information, probably the Obama administration’s worst nightmare in this regard: an opinion-piece from a leading Danish writer asking “Why are we in Afghanistan?”

The author, Carsten Jensen, is prize-winning novelist and columnist who has also travelled to Afghanistan four times already. In the early paragraphs of his piece, though, you almost have a sense of witnessing him undermining his own argument (which is against a Danish presence in Afghanistan, of course) by seemingly basing it on pacifism – a principle important in his country but probably not much of anywhere else. For did you know that it has been almost 145 years since the Danes have found themselves in a shooting-war? Yes, they managed to skip both World Wars (although they were occupied for much of the Second; you really can’t characterize the defense they offered to the Germans as very military), so the last violence they were involved in had to do with Prussian and Austrian soldiers invading in 1864 the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein on the European mainland, south of Jutland, to seize them permanently. Back in these contemporary times, Jensen reports that a number of books and articles have come out that recount and even celebrate the military exploits of the Danish contingent in Afghanistan, with even a “triumphalist” tone. And so he asks – ironically, one presumes – “The Danish are in the process of finding themselves again [i.e. rediscovering their Inner Viking]. Or are we?”

Again, all this alarm over being at war once again after 145 years may be faintly amusing, but it is likely not to strike much of a chord with any reader lacking the appropriate Danish sensibilities. (Although I grant that, since the piece of course is in Danish, it’s hard to imagine anyone without those sensibilities ever actually reading it.) But Jensen’s argument gets better, of course, much better in fact, as he goes on to voice some fundamental questions about involvement in that part of the world which one hopes would already have been posed and answered long before, but which one suspects in fact never were. Like the title question, for example: Why are we there? “To help out,” is the answer Jensen supposes the majority of the Danish electorate would give. But no:

At most that bare-minimum help, which is mostly of a cosmetic nature, serves the goal of creating temporary good-will in the local population in Helmand [where the Danish are stationed] so that they shoot a bit less frequently at the Danish troops. Any real help towards the rebuilding of society, that has been devastated after 30 years of war, is not up for discussion. . . . Civil society has not been rebuilt. The institutions that should give the Afghan government authority and the population confidence have never been created.

Indeed, as regards that Afghan government Jensen reminds us of an important point: there may be a (please forgive the expression) notional national Afghan government sitting in Kabul, headed by President Hamid Karzai, but the fundamental reality of what happened with the late-2001 American intervention there was that the various warlords holding real power in different parts of the country, having been deposed by the Taliban, were restored to their positions, so that that is in fact the country’s governing power-structure to this day. Now, does anyone really think, for example, that the West’s involvement in Afghanistan has achieved greater rights for the women there? Perhaps in the Potemkin-reality in and around the supposed capital Kabul; but certainly not in most of the country, as the warlords in charge there are not interested in such things. (Nor are, of course, the Taliban who themselves control ever-more territory.) Indeed, quite apart from women’s rights, Jensen quotes from one of those very same articles depicting the Danish soldiers’ military activities in Helmand province about the rampant pedophilia – yes, the sexual abuse of children – they noticed in the local culture, and you can bet that the warlords have little interest in doing anything about that either.

Against this background, Barack Obama’s notion of transferring to Afghanistan from Iraq the idea of a “surge” and the troops that embody it is simplistic nonsense. It represents a naive reliance on boots-on-the-ground and the additional military firepower they embody to finally achieve some “success” there, when the experience of the Soviets – with many more boots and firepower in place during their time there – shows clearly that succeeding in Afghanistan is not about that. Besides, Jensen provocatively points out, what makes you think that even the “surge” in Iraq was a success?

If you mean that elections in which everyone uniformly votes according to their ethnic or religious allegiance instead of voting based on a bundle of economic and political interests can be the cornerstone of a democracy, then yes, Iraq is a success.

If you mean that the most effective way to combat religious militias is to put the warriors into police uniforms and thereby give state sanction to terror, then yes, Iraq is truly also a success.

If you mean that the best way to make a lasting peace is to pay 90,000 armed Sunni rebels $300 per month to not shoot at the soldiers from the American occupation-army, then yes, I’ll give in once more: Irak is unquestionably a success.

So there! But back to Afghanistan: Amazingly, more than seven years after the first American intervention there in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it is nonetheless quite possible that we of the West still have not fundamentally thought through just what it is we’re doing there, what we want, what victory would look like, whether that “victory” is at all attainable with the resources we are willing to devote. Or as Jensen puts it: “In Afghanistan we have merely overloaded outselves militarily, but also morally through our high-blown rhetoric. We have created the image of an obligation that we neither can nor want to live up to, so that hypocrisy has therefore become our only way out.” Sound a bit like the American experience in Vietnam? Let’s not make the same mistake then, says Jensen: stop the hypocrisy and just get out.

                          

For today, though, I think that it would be suitable to turn our attention to the supposed ultimate source of that al-Qaeda attack, and also the first target for retribution by US forces in its aftermath. That is of course Afghanistan, or specifically al-Qaeda as embedded within a Taliban host environment. Actually, putting it that way shifts the proper focus a slight bit from Afghani territory per se to the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan lying along the Afghani border. These are hardly “federally administered,” they are in fact a region completely out of the control of the Pakistani government, where various varieties of “neo-Taliban” and Muslim fundamentalist forces are based (including, it is thought, what is left of al-Qaeda), and from which these forces sally forth to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The addressing of this topic now is boosted considerably by Dexter Filkin’s excellent article, “Talibanistan: Right at the Edge” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The take-away: The Taliban and al-Qaeda fully control these tribal areas, and the Pakistani government has no problem with that. Any purported actions by the Pakistani army against the region are sheer political theater, designed only to fool the outside world – and in particular Pakistan’s billion-dollar paymaster, the US – that something serious is being done. And then we have today’s report in the New York Times of President George W. Bush authorizing sometime in July “American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.” (The NYT reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti note “It is unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country” – but when has mere legality ever been a consideration for the Bush administration?) The same article quotes “Pakistan’s top army officer” (without naming him – so that must be Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kiyani) as declaring “that his forces would not tolerate American excursions,” but one happened anyway on September 3, a Navy SEAL helicopter raid within Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities then closed the supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass for a few hours – first to show “how serious [they] are,” but then allegedly only due to “security reasons.”

Terrorist Breeding-Ground

This view of the extremist danger residing there in the so-called Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas is by no means confined to Washington. As Der Tagesspiegel reports, on his recent visit to Berlin the Afghan foreign minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta termed that area “a breeding-ground for terrorists,” and called for a “geographical” expansion of the struggle against radical Islamists, presumably including in that the recent sort of incursions into Pakistan carried out by US forces. But he also expressed his government’s support for the new Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and his stated intention to start going seriously after those Islamic militants in the tribal areas.

But where have we heard “start going seriously after them” before? From former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s government, that is where, and Der Tagesspiegel’s Christine Möllhoff (Once your reputation is ruined) sees even less hope that Zardari will do what he promises than she had in his predecessor. Her article’s very first sentences read “You wouldn’t even trust Asif Ali Zardari with your car-keys, so bad is the reputation of Pakistan’s new president. The 53-year-old is regarded as a man without morals or principles, who is deeply corrupt and will stop at nothing.” This is, you may recall, the widow of Benazir Bhutto, known throughout the sub-continent as “Mr. 10 Percent” for his regular kick-back demands back when his wife headed the Pakistani government in the late eighties and early nineties, which afterwards landed him for a long stretch of time in jail.

Everyone Wants a Slice of Mr. 10 Percent

Still, Möllhoff can offer up one slight ray of hope that “Mr. 10 Percent” might do the right thing and actually send his forces against the tribal militants. He is now in a position of responsibility, and knows that his country would basically go bankrupt were it not for US financial support, so maybe he will be willing to dance to the Americans’ tune. It’s certainly true that the militants have thrown down their gauntlet to the new Pakistani president, as Le Monde’s special correspondent in Islamabad, Frédéric Bobin, reports (In Pakistan, the Taliban defy the new president Asif Zardari). Bobin notes how they prepared a special welcoming gesture for Zardari: last Saturday (6 September), as he was being elected president, a suicide-bomber killed thirty-three people in Peshawar, the main city in that tribal district. And he goes on to outline the tricky challenge that Zardari faces: suppressing the Islamist militants (if that is really what he desires to do) while maintaining good relations with both the US and the Pakistani military that has to do this dirty work for him (and which has a history of destabilizing civilian governments, particularly when they are headed by the Pakistani People’s Party, which was the power-vehicle of the Bhutto family and which he now heads) – and of course with Pakistani public opinion, in theory at least the ones who have put him into power, and which is becoming more and more angry about the American military incursions into Pakistani territory, which infringe on the country’s notional “sovereignty.”

(Quick side-note: Bobin mentions “ground combat” by Pakistani forces against militants in the valley of Swat. I wonder if they will strike out trying to capture the Sultan in charge there – just a gratuitous baseball reference there, folks.)

Indeed, further such incursions could lead to the collapse of the Pakistani government, at least according to a report in the Flemish newspaper Het Belang van Limburg (“American raids in Pakistan destabilize Pakistani army”). That is the conclusion of a confidential report delivered to the White House last month (together with an oral briefing) from the National Intelligence Council, which is the internal governmental “think tank” for the US intelligence community. The message is that the indignation that both the Pakistani army and public opinion (including the legislature, which voted to condemn last Saturday’s commando raid) show in reaction to the American incursions is 100% real. Such raids will therefore tend to drastically lower the domestic standing of any who seem to support them, in particular the new president, which could lead to Zardari’s early departure from that post even though such further instability would ordinarily be the last thing anyone in the country desires.

Cambodia Incursion Precedent

It’s true that the Bush administration has been willing to put up for years with the aggravation of allowing an untouchable sanctuary across the border in Pakistan for Taliban fighters fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan. No doubt all that time the pressure from the American military has been intense to be allowed to go after these personnel in their sanctuaries, and evidently that patience has now come to an end – despite the great pressure that such measures will put on that neighboring state, which is already marked by chronic instability (but which also is a nuclear power, let it be noted). The situation easily brings to mind that of the Vietnam War: in that conflict over-the-border sanctuaries for guerrilla fighters were also a big problem, mainly located in Cambodia. Starting in 1970, the Nixon-Kissinger team then in charge of US foreign policy finally lost patience, acceded to US military demands to be allowed to go after them, and so gave a green light to both a massive bombing campaign (initially secret) and military incursions into Cambodia which aroused massive domestic opposition (including the notorious Kent State riots). Ultimately, those incursions did nothing to turn the tide of the war, but they did do much to destabilize the Cambodian government, ultimately leading to the mass-killing horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

At least Cambodia never possessed a nuclear arsenal; neither did it have a sixty-year history of tension, marked by disputed territory and punctuated by several wars, with its neighbor in the other direction. George W. Bush of course is still US president and Commander-in-Chief, and it must also be noted that this new move of allowing US military raids into Pakistan seems very close to the sorts of measures advocated on the campaign trail by the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Still, the volatility in that part of the world, always unpleasantly high, has been ratcheted up another step.

                          

Philippe Grangereau, Washington correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, sheds some valuable light on this question in his article The White House Is No Longer Kissy-Kissy with Musharraf, although he relies primarily on analysis coming from Arif Jamal, “an expert on Pakistan at NYU,” who has written a book about Pakistani jihadists.

If you think about it (and/or pay attention to developments), this cooling-down of the Bush administration’s relationship with Musharraf isn’t really much of a surprise, in view of the close ties Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (abbreviated as ISI) enjoy with “Islamic militants” (to include the Taliban), that the American intelligence establishment has finally picked up on. In general, this turns out to mean substantial if covert Pakistani support for precisely those Islamist parties that NATO is fighting against to try to make a stable country out of Afghanistan; specifically, it means nasty incidents worked up by the ISI and its friends like the bomb-blast at the Indian embassy in Kabul of last 7 July, which killed 54 people including the Indian defense attaché.

Jamal – as conveyed into French by his scribe Grangereau – makes a number of cogent points about this situation. First of all, the number-one strategic priority of the Pakistani military is what it has been ever since partition in 1947: to recover the state of Kashmir, which it regards as justly belonging to Pakistan, in its entirety. To pursue this, Islamic militants are precisely who you want to have working on your side, even if they then expect your covert support for some of their other projects elsewhere. Secondly, Musharraf is not the most powerful Pakistani figure anyway. That is instead General Ashfaq Kiyani, Army Chief of Staff. Jamal speculates that, if Musharraf is heading towards impeachment, then that must be because General Kiyani supports the move, because it would not be allowed to happen without that support. In any case, he contends that the Americans wrote off Musharraf a year and a half ago, when Benazir Bhutto started preparations to return to her country and contest elections.

In this light, then, the complete lack of anyone in absence taking up Musharraf’s cause comes as no surprise. Rather, it is General Kiyani who is under Washington’s microscope as the US determines whether to support him or not. In view of the fact, as Jamal informs us, that he is even more supportive of Afghan jihadists/Taliban than even Musharraf was willing to be, the answer would seem to be obvious; but then again, the alternative to supporting the General may very well be political chaos in this vital Muslim nuclear power, in view of the demonstrated problems which the new governing coalition that arose after elections earlier this year has shown in trying to get its act together.

                          

In all, it’s an enormous ball of fluff, the groupie-tone of which you can appreciate by just taking a look at the accompanying video: maybe you won’t be able to understand the German, but that doesn’t matter so much, as you can rest assured that what is being expressed is the usual stuff of “He was an amazing man to meet!” and “I still think it was only a dream!” It’s obvious that the Economist’s linguistic and analytical talents would better have been employed addressing reaction to Obama’s Berlin visit and his speech coming from an actual representative of the serious German press – could it be that the Bild story was irresistible because it allowed a follow-on mention (check it out, it’s also right there in the Certain Ideas of Europe piece) of Obama’s picture right there on the Bild’s front cover above the topless-girl-of-the-day? Obama smiling and waving just above the fold; topless Claudia on her knees and looking towards the camera seductively just below the fold; the New Republic’s weblog The Plank thoughtfully reproduces that front page shot here. (To be fair, this is of course hardly the only piece the Bild Zeitung delivers about Obama’s visit. Then again: it’s only the Bild Zeitung, whose very name means “Picture Newspaper,” thereby making clear where its editorial priorities lie.)

Obama groupie-love, topless model: how very . . . remarkable! (*Sniff*) But never mind, beloved EuroSavant audience, let’s go make that ramble through (some of) the serious German press that, for whatever reason, our MSM colleagues at the Economist eschewed.

Stuck in Berlin’s “Front-Line Myth”

At the Siegessäule

At the peak of the serious German press – actually a weekly newspaper with a higher degree of commentary in its pieces than sheer reporting, along the lines of the Economist itself – is Die Zeit, so let’s start with Yes, we can hope! (title in English), by Christoph Seils. “The party is over, the Superstar has left,” he begins. Now it is the time for a level-headed assessment of what this was really all about. Yes, he is an impressive speaker, who calmly delivered a quite capable speech in front of more than 200,000 cheering onlookers. Then again, in that speech he clung to what Seils calls “the front-line myth” that Americans seem to continue to hold about Berlin, but which is not true anymore at all. Berlin is not anymore any focal-point of ideological confrontation and by no means recognizes itself as such; rather, it’s the city of the Love Parade, for Heaven’s sake, which used to wind its crazy, techno-dancing way past the very Siegessäule before which Obama spoke! (Granted, the Love Parade now has started to be held elsewhere, after Berlin started to tire of dealing with the yearly hordes of people and their trash: for 2008 it just occurred last Saturday, 19 July, in the western German city of Dortmund.)

As you would expect, Seils does get past the hype to treat the unavoidable fact that, for all the greater cooperation and listening that an Obama administration will offer Europe, it also will demand more of its European allies and will be, with its wide smile, its seeming reasonableness, and thus its marked contrast to the widely-detested Bush regime, much harder to refuse. From the very structure of and statements eminating from this overseas trip, it is crystal-clear that at the top of that list of demands from our NATO allies will be a greater devotion of men and resources to Afghanistan to match what President Obama will be ready to commit. Seils’ article excels in that it depicts the problem that will cause rather starkly: involvement in Afghanistan – any involvement in all, much less the troops and money that are already going there – is widely unpopular in Germany. The meme of “why are we there in the first place?” is ever-present in public discussion. Still, again, that smiling President Obama will want even more. If only those predominantly youngsters clapping and cheering in front of the Senator’s speaker’s podium yesterday evening could realize that – they might change their tune!

He also reminds them – reminds all his readers – that, for all their rapture, it is not they or any Germans who will decide whether Barack Obama becomes the next US president, but rather American voters. And that race still seems very close.

Not to Gerhard Spörl of Der Spiegel, it seems, whose contribution to the post-Berlin analysis is No. 44 Has Spoken. Yeah, this one is pretty hagiographic – somewhat better than the “I met him in the gym!” Bild Zeitung piece, but not by much. Anyway, you can read it for yourself since Der Spiegel “put it on their English-language website (which, you’ll see there, has it’s own version of the George W. Bush’s-remaining-time-in-office countdown!).

Here, Have Some Bitter Truth

Columnist Thomas Hanke of the business newspaper Handelsblatt seemingly witnessed nothing but hard reality in Obama’s words, as he makes clear in his piece Cold Fervor. The references to the Berlin blockader were not just there to make everyone feel good; the decades-long confrontation in the city with the Soviets was brought up as an analogy to the severe tests which the West again faces today, especially in Afghanistan. In Hanke’s eyes, Obama in his speech was simply serving up the “bitter truth” that hard work and sacrifice lie ahead of America and its allies, and the replacement of Bush in the White House with another president is not going to change any of that. There can be no more illusions; Europeans will have to join the US in stepping up and taking responsibility for addressing the world’s problems as well.

Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Yes He Can), Reymer Klüver both marvels at and dismisses Obama’s Berlin speech and his conduct on this overseas trip in general. On the one hand, the tour has been tremendously valuable to him in that it has demonstrated that he is definitely presidential material. The increasing influence of policy steps he has long advocated – both diplomatic discussions with Iran and a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq – has showcased his judgment.

Then again, the appearance in Berlin might have come at considerable ultimate cost to Germany – “Obama will be expensive for Germany,” Klüver writes. This is naturally because of the “shared sacrifices” that he made clear in his speech that he will be demanding of America’s allies. Still, one can still doubt how much of this will actually translate into concrete action when/if he becomes president. One must remember that 1) The real audience for the speech was American voters, not those who gathered in the Tiergarten to actually hear it, and 2) Obama has already displayed a capacity for abandoning positions he once held in the past (e.g. opposition to free trade/NAFTA), so that should be kept in mind.

Obama to Shove More Burdens Onto Allies?

Also on the Süddeutsche Zeitung site there is currently an interview, conducted by Thomas Denkler, with an “America-expert” from the German Society for External Politics, one Josef Braml (“Obama will not walk on water”). He makes some good points, such as linking Obama’s call for shared sacrifice with the orientation of his speech to the American electorate: what with the economic troubles in which the US now finds itself, interest has grown (especially among Democratic Party constituents) in cutting back on some of the money the country spends for its overseas engagements, by transferring some of that burden onto the allies, in order to have more financial resources to devote to problems at home. Also, even if he is elected president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama can still not expect easy going because of the ideological divisions that persist even within his own party – over free trade, for example, and questions of Homeland Security.

The Frankfurther Rundschau is also a serious German paper, from the country’s fifth-largest city and financial capital. In his analysis The World Becomes Young), FR columnist Harry Nutt has a curious take on Obama’s Berlin visit. He estimates that half of the 200,000 who gathered to hear the Senator live were under the age of 20. What is more, whether the Obama campaign cottoned on to this or not when they were persuaded to accept the Siegessäule as an alternate venue for the speech they wanted to schedule, that monument and the enormous circular square in which it is located (the Großer Stern) does not really anymore symbolize to Germans anything out of their history, presumably because anything it might have once symbolized was entirely discredited in the wake of the Second World War. Rather, (and as above), if you hit a German with Siegessäule! in a word-association test his response will probably be “Love Parade!”, and/or the “fan-miles” that were set up there on the boulevards between that monument and the Reichstag/Brandenburg Gate for swarms of football fans from all over the world during the World Cup in 2006, which Germany hosted, as well as the recent European Championship.

So the audience and the venue itself was all about young people, young culture; Nutt chides Obama that the numerous references he made to the Berlin Airlift were entirely without effect – that is just something out of some history book the members of the audience have been required to study. Still, quite an impressive mass of them showed up to hear the speech, and they proved loud and enthusiastic during it; what were they doing there, then? Firstly, they were looking for something as unlike as they could get to George W. Bush, something that could make them believe in politics again. But they were therefore also looking for an effective new politics, that can get results: “It is the hope for a Realpolitik, that nonetheless can be paired with Passion,” as Nutt puts it.

Amero-Centric

On the other hand, FR contributor Marcia Pally didn’t know about young-vs.-old, but all that she saw filling the square in front of Obama – presumably being present there herself – was Americans (Ich bin eine Berlinerin – Berlinerin merely meaning “female Berliner”). But that was somehow appropriate, anyway: after all, the speech was really meant for the American electorate back home, one big laundry-list of what Obama’s “change” is supposed to mean: putting in order the Iraq problem, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, AIDS, climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons, the gulf between rich and poor, and the democratic deficit.

That’s quite a list. And Obama has also come to Europe to let the Europeans know that, if he is president, they will be listened to again. But why does Europe need the US for that? Most people, if they find that absolutely no one is listening to them, simply hire a psychiatrist. And why can’t Europe develop its own approaches to all those problems Obama is promising to bring “change” to? Those are good points, but especially surprising given their source, for Pally’s article itself had to be translated for publication in the FR, from English, for she is a professor who regularly teaches at NYU and a permanent Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, who has just been recently in Berlin as an academic fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Finally to the Financial Times Deutschland, and to a non-bylined editorial (thus representing the views of the editorial board collectively) that also looks ahead to the cold reality that is sure to come after the smiles, cheers and handshakes are long in the past: Hangover After the Intoxication. For what a President Obama has in mind for the world can be seen by the very itinerary of this overseas trip: first to Afghanistan and the Middle East, to take stock of the problems, and then to Europe, to seek help in their solutions. But it didn’t take this trip to enlighten German politicians about what President Obama would ask of them: it has been clear for some time that he would be after both a greater troop and financial commitment to Afghanistan (including changing their rules of engagement so that they are allowed to venture where things are actually dangerous, namely the South of the country), even as they seem to want to treat the American as some “cuddly stuffed animal,” that “says conciliatory phrases when you shake his hand.” But its the German voters, who don’t find it in their job-description to keep track of such things so closely, who could find themselves disappointed in the end, when “Obama’s new America strives after the old objectives” but turns out to be that much harder to say “no” to, precisely because of his great contrast with George W. Bush.

One interesting point the editors bring up: just as a notional Obama administration will be getting up and running in 2009, so will Germany enter its own campaign ahead of national elections in that year. Especially when Germans are running for re-election, they become very reluctant to being depicted as mere American “poodles,” so to say. (The word belongs to the British, not the Germans: it’s the idea I’m after here.) Those so eager to partake of the Obama-aura yeterday could well find themselves in the end rooting for John McCain – a figure much easier to say “no” to.

                          

It seems some NATO alliance partners are rather unimpressed with the level of contribution offered by certain others, and are ratcheting up the pressure on these laggards to get more with the program. This argument dominated the NATO conference of defense ministers held last week in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. As you can expect, the US is the leading country among that first group, but Canada has been complaining as well. That country currently has 2,500 troops stationed in dangerous southern Afghanistan, by Kandahar, and has even threatened to send those troops home once its current commitment comes to an end if there are no new troop commitments to southern Afghanistan from other NATO allies.

Of course, it’s not too polite to explicitly name the targets from what we could call the “slacker” camp whom you’re trying to pressure to do more. Still, the side-hints were clear that Germany heads that list. For although there are now German troops currently serving in Afganistan, they are stationed in the relatively-peaceful North of the country, and they further operate under rules of engagement which restrict them to firing their weapons only in self-defense. German officials had been asked – prior to the Vilnius conference – to commit more troops, and to permit the new troops and those in the North to be transferred to the South, but so far the German government has refused.

On to Munich

That dispute was not going to be allowed to die in Vilnius, for – lo and behold – right after the NATO conference all the leading players were scheduled to proceed straight to Munich, to the Conference on Security Policy that takes place there each year at this time in February. Waiting for them was Horst Teltschik, the German politician and international businessman who serves as the Munich Conference’s chief officer, and as his visitors made their way there he had some remarks to make to German radio which were picked up by the home-town newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung (“NATO is at the limit of its possibilities”). NATO is trying to do too much, was Teltschik’s verdict; what was needed at the conference was an intensive discussion about just where NATO should be engaged and where it should not be. But shouldn’t such calculations already have been made by this point? Actually, In Teltschik’s view, no, they have not, because of poor communication between America and its European allies: the US marched into Afghanistan in the first place without any consultation, according to Teltschik. (This is a bit glib: the US attacked Afghanistan in October, 2001, in response to the attacks of 11 September, which spurred the NATO allies to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, essentially identifying the September 11 attacks as attacks on all NATO members. And while it is true that the Bush administration showed little need or tolerance for outside input when planning its attack upon Afghanistan, April 2003 did see NATO collectively and voluntarily take over command of forces there, the ISAF. I submit that it was that point – at the latest – which was the occasion for weighing whether NATO belonged in Afghanistan, and that the takeover of ISAF command constituted a clear, if implicit, answer.) Still, Teltschik is willing to countenance sending German soldiers to reinforce NATO efforts in southern Afghanistan, i.e. what the German government is currently refusing, although he also suggests that other NATO countries such as Italy and Spain be reminded of their obligations to the Alliance as well.

Ultimately, though, Horst Teltschik these days is not empowered to speak for that government, no matter how “plugged-in” he is to the highest German political circles. It is still instructive to hear the views of such a German politician, especially when he reveals himself to be somewhat less hard-line on the subject of reinforcing/modifying the German role in Afghanistan than his government. Die Zeit now has an article on-line (Die for Afghanistan?) which takes this further by surveying seven other prominent figures, most involved in some way in the German government, about whether German soldiers should be called upon to – as the title puts it – “die for Afghanistan.”

Still Believers in Afghanistan

Reading through the article, it’s a relief to learn that the vast majority of the interviewees still believe in the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Particularly interesting are the comments recorded from Eckart von Klaeden, who is the foreign affairs spokesman for the co-governing CDU/CSU (i.e. conservative) faction in the Bundestag. The German mission to Afghanistan, he notes, marks the crucial new stage in German foreign policy – whose beginning can be said to have occurred on 11 September – in which his country has shown itself finally to be willing to take up it global responsibilities with global deployments. (In the 1990s all that Germans were willing to countenance in the way of military deployment was the immediate European area, i.e. the Balkans. And before that, since World War II the Germans had been unwilling to consider any deployment of their troops outside of their own country at all.) He identifies what he calls “the danger of islamic fundamentalism” and says that anyone who thinks they can avoid that by avoiding the fight against it is fooling themselves. Now, all of this is the sort of language you would expect from someone who after all is a spokesman for government policy – except that there is nothing in his statement that holds back or qualifies the above statements, which might be rather strange in that, as I have noted, German government decision-makers currently have set their face against any change or supplement to the German mission. There seems to be an inconsistency here, no?

Further encouraging talk issues from Heiner Geissler, of the CDU, who is also a well-respected politician emeritus in the mold of Horst Teltschik. “If NATO is unsuccessful, then the Front [against terrorism] will shift to Hamburg, or to Frankfurt.” Good, hard-core stuff, but Geissler also sees justification for the German mission in Afghanistan in the advancement of human rights and democracy, namely against religious suppression. We’re fighting a world-wide civil war, Geissler avers, one that is dangerous because it is irrational, based as it is upon a religion, and “Islam is even a dangerous religion, because it empowers its believers to go wage war.”

Beer-Buddy

So much for members of the governing coalition – what about, say, the Greens? The Die Zeit article does also contain a brief interview with Angelika Beer, political-security spokesperson for the Greens in the European Parliament, and her attitude is also pretty much as positive as could be expected: “We stand responsible for stabilizing Afghanistan.” However, she is not in favor of sending the German troops to southern Afghanistan – not until conditions in the South become like conditions in the North where the Germans are already located, i.e. where things have calmed down to the point that meaningful reconstruction and other civilian-assistance projects can be undertaken. In other words: We don’t want to send our troops to the South to fight to bring peaceful conditions there until peaceful conditions in fact already prevail there!

There’s also a contribution from one Bernhard Gertz, Chairman of the Bundeswehrverband, which I interpret as being not really a soldiers’ union, but rather a soldiers’ lobbying group much like the Association of the United States Army. Gertz takes a “yes, but” position much like Green politician Beer: We must indeed fight in Afghanistan against al-Qaida, let’s not bury our heads in the sand! – but, then again, sending any more troops than there already are won’t really do any good. Finally, there has got to be at least someone from the “nay” side to give the piece some balance, and for that the Die Zeit editors bring in Feridun Zaimoglu, idenitified as “writer and member of the German Islamic Conference.” The German presence in Afghanistan is complete nonsense, Zaimoglu advises – it’s the “ass of the world” anyway, and sending our troops there only servers to advance American imperialism, etc. etc.

Taken as a whole, then, the tone of most of these interviews displays continuing support among leading German opinion-makers for the German mission in Afghanistan. Again, much of this is in fact hard to reconcile with the government’s current hard-and-fast “no” to requests to send more troops and deploy more of them down where they are needed, namely to help out hard-pressed NATO allied forces in the South of the country. This dissonance suggests to me that that German government “no” won’t stand for long, and at least some sort of compromise is sure to be found.

UPDATE: The evidence continues to pile up that the rest of the German government is hardly as opposed to the idea of sending German troops to the more-dangerous southern regions of Afghanistan as is the very top. This article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals how Ruprecht Polenz (CDU) – no less than the Chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee – has made it clear he sees nothing wrong with sending German troops to the South, in an interview with radio station SWR. And our old friend Eckart von Klaeden (quoted above in the Die Zeit interview-article) reappears here to urge his government to be “more offensive-oriented” in its support to NATO allies in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the Süddeutsche Zeitung also cites Gernot Erler (who, as Staatsminister im Auswärtigen Amt is the equivalent of an American Under-Secretary of State) to the effect that Germany cannot be called a slacker when it comes to contributions to the Afghanistan effort – 3,200 soldiers deployed plus Tornado fighter-bombers, and 26 dead so far – and it is therefore not fair to ask her to do more.