Report: Washington Arranged Musharraf-Bhutto Alliance

A civilian president with the power to handle national security and foreign affairs and a prime minister as chief executive is the new Washington and London formula for regime change in Pakistan.

This has been agreed to in principle by President General Pervez Musharraf and former premier Benazir Bhutto, Asia Times Online has confirmed. The arrangement for the United States' key ally in the "war on terror" is intended to lead to a jacking up of the fight against terror with zero tolerance.

Musharraf and Bhutto met last week in the United Arab Emirates - where Bhutto lives in exile - and agreed on the most important issues for a new political setup. This includes lifting a ban on a person serving a third term as premier (Bhutto has served twice - 1988-90 and 1993-96) and allowing her to return to Pakistan without threat of legal action - she faces corruption charges.

After eight years in power since his bloodless military coup in 1999, Musharraf finally appears to have been convinced that the time has come for him to shed his uniform and return the country to a semblance of democratic normalcy. ...

The talks between Musharraf and Bhutto were the result of a prolonged process in which Washington played a pivotal role. Nevertheless, the direct involvement of a British Foreign Office official, who had served in Pakistan, played an important role in resolving some of the terms of the agreement.

The deal has been finalized at a critical juncture of the "war on terror" as Pakistan is under immense pressure to carry out a powerful military assault against al-Qaeda and Taliban bases in Pakistani territory.

New US legislation aims to tie aid for Pakistan to its performance in fighting terrorism. Pakistan has received more than US$10 billion in US aid since 2001. The administration of President George W Bush has also made it clear that it will take matters into its own hands if necessary and conduct its own raids inside Pakistan to tackle militants. ...

Pakistani analysts speculate that Musharraf might appoint the present director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant-General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kiyani, to replace him as chief of army staff. Musharraf would then become a civilian president. There might be a legal issue here, though. Currently, government servants need a two-year break before they can participate in politics.

Another problem is the army itself. A significant section of the military resents Musharraf for siding with the US in the "war on terror", as this meant initially the severing of ties with the Taliban, whom Pakistan nurtured into power in Afghanistan in 1996. Subsequently, the military has been forced to launch highly unpopular offensives in the tribal areas, and has alienated the jihadist groups it had previously courted. ...

Some doubt ... that the Musharraf-Bhutto tango will work.

"This idea of a civilian president coordinating with a chief of army staff is not possible. Once Musharraf steps down as military chief, no chief of army staff would listen to him," retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, former Multan corps commander and director general of the ISI, told Asia Times Online.

Pakistan might get its regime change - but not exactly as planned in the corridors of power in Washington.

Prepping the Domestic Battlespace For September

Today brings a couple of examples of the ramped-up pro-Iraq war Perception Management campaign going into the critical September Petraeus report time frame.

First the inspiring story of a wounded soldier's re-enlistment:

Marine Cpl. Gareth Hawkins extended his enlistment to go on a third deployment to Iraq so his battalion would not be left in the hands of rookies.

Twenty days after he arrived in Iraq for the third time, a roadside bomb exploded beneath his 7-ton truck, leaving Hawkins dazed and his heel shattered.

Minutes later, his pain held at bay by morphine, the 23-year-old asked to complete one piece of unfinished business before being rushed via ambulance to undergo surgery at the hospital at the Marine air base in Taqaddum.

He wanted to reenlist for another four-year hitch.

A photographer was nearby and took a picture of the ad hoc ceremony: Hawkins on a stretcher with his right hand in the air as officers administered the reenlistment oath.

The photograph has made the rounds of military and political opinion websites and publications, including the conservative National Review.

With both the Army and Marine Corps laboring to persuade combat veterans to stay in the service, the picture may be assuming iconic status.

The photograph is in the office of Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the Marine Corps' top enlisted leader, who may use it as he tries to persuade other young Marines to stay on.

Today's other -- and more prominent -- Domestic Influence offering is an op-ed in the New York Times attesting to the remarkable eleventh hour military turnaround of U.S. fortunes in Iraq:

Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. ...

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). ...

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

The "Winner Complex"

Here's one guy who is clearly not a believer in "American exceptionalism."

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, accused the United States of having a "winner complex" after the end of the cold war, which, he said, led to recklessness in international relations, the Interfax news agency reported. "The U.S. is always anxious to win," Mr. Gorbachev told a news conference in Moscow. "The fact that they suffer this disorder, the winner complex, is the main reason why things are so complicated in the world." He criticized the "current U.S. administration" for trying to build a new empire in the world and said other countries would not accept that arrangement. He said that claims of victory after the cold war led the United States to feel its hands were untied in world affairs. "We all lost the cold war," he said, "and we all benefited from its end."

Sending a Message to the Saudis

The Saudis tried to PSYOP high-level U.S. officials regarding the Maliki government in Iraq.

Turnabout is fair play. This morning, U.S. national security officials are sending a message to the Saudis, via the pages of the New York Times.

During a high-level meeting in Riyadh in January, Saudi officials confronted a top American envoy with documents that seemed to suggest that Iraq's prime minister could not be trusted.

One purported to be an early alert from the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr warning him to lie low during the coming American troop increase, which was aimed in part at Mr. Sadr's militia. Another document purported to offer proof that Mr. Maliki was an agent of Iran.

The American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, immediately protested to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, contending that the documents were forged. But, said administration officials who provided an account of the exchange, the Saudis remained skeptical, adding to the deep rift between America's most powerful Sunni Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, and its Shiite-run neighbor, Iraq.

Now, Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia's counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.

One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, "That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not."

Senior Bush administration officials said the American concerns would be raised next week when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates make a rare joint visit to Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Washington have long resisted blaming Saudi Arabia for the chaos and sectarian strife in Iraq, choosing instead to pin blame on Iran and Syria. Even now, military officials rarely talk publicly about the role of Saudi fighters among the insurgents in Iraq.

The accounts of American concerns came from interviews with several senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.

In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course.

The American officials said they had no doubt that the documents shown to Mr. Khalilzad were forgeries, though the Saudis said they had obtained them from sources in Iraq. "Maliki wouldn't be stupid enough to put that on a piece of paper," one senior Bush administration official said. He said Mr. Maliki later assured American officials that the documents were forgeries. ...

Saudi Arabia months ago made a pitch to enlist other Persian Gulf countries to take a direct role in supporting Sunni tribal groups in Iraq, said one former American ambassador with close ties to officials in the Middle East. The former ambassador, Edward W. Gnehm, who has served in Kuwait and Jordan, said that during a recent trip to the region he was told that Saudi Arabia had pressed other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council -- which includes Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman -- to give financial support to Sunnis in Iraq. The Saudis made this effort last December, Mr. Gnehm said.

The closest the administration has come to public criticism was an Op-Ed page article about Iraq in The New York Times last week by Mr. Khalilzad, now the United States ambassador to the United Nations. "Several of Iraq's neighbors -- not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the United States -- are pursuing destabilizing policies," Mr. Khalilzad wrote. Administration officials said Mr. Khalilzad was referring specifically to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Today's piece doesn't even have to count as "public criticism." The use of anonymous sources conveyed in a mainstream media outlet insulates the administration from responsibility for this riposte -- surely part of an Information Operations strategy aimed at our erstwhile Saudi allies.

GAO Iraq War Report Due in September

We haven't heard the war supporters talk about this.

There will be a government report on the Iraq war issued shortly before the much anticipated Petraeus/Crocker report that will work as a checksum for the accuracy of administration claims of progress.

In a little-noticed addition to legislation requiring the July and September assessments on Iraq from the White House, Congress mandated a third report from the agency that has quietly done the most work to track the missteps, miscalculations, misspent funds and shortfalls of both the United States and Iraq since the 2003 invasion: the Government Accountability Office. ...

The 15-person team includes an array of specialists, lawyers, economists, foreign policy experts and statisticians. Most have been working on Iraq since June 2003, when the first GAO reports were mandated. They work on a day-to-day basis with the departments of State and Defense, but the GAO makes independent assessments.

The GAO report is due Sept. 1 -- two weeks before the administration's document. So it may set a standard that makes it harder for the administration to attach caveats to its answers, as outside analysts say it did in the July report.

The administration's assessments are more nuanced, with grading based on whether Iraq is making "satisfactory progress" or "unsatisfactory progress" on the 18 political, military and economic benchmarks. The GAO is mandated to give a more straightforward "yes" or "no" on whether the benchmarks have been achieved, said Joseph A. Christoff, director of the GAO's International Affairs and Trade Team, which will write the report.

Christoff anticipates blunt critiques in the GAO report, based on benchmarks his team has long been monitoring as part of its oversight of Iraq.

On Iraq's military, for example, the administration's July report said Iraq is making "satisfactory progress" on providing three brigades for the new U.S.-led Baghdad security plan.

But Christoff said the GAO is probing deeper. "For us, it's not just an issue of showing up, but showing up with equipment and logistical support so they can move on their own, and then being effective," he said. ...

On Iraq's economy, the July [White House] report said Baghdad is progressing satisfactorily in allocating $10 billion for development to its ministries and provinces, much of it for electricity and oil industry infrastructure. But Christoff is again skeptical. "If the past is any indication, it will also be very difficult to meet this benchmark," he said.

The need for development in the two sectors is critical. The oil-rich country last year spent $2.6 billion to import gasoline, diesel fuel for electricity and kerosene for cooking, because it cannot refine enough oil, Christoff said. Also, U.S. officials acknowledge, Iraq managed to allocate only about a quarter of the $10 billion in development funds during the first six months of 2007 -- much of which has not been spent.

"When you look at what is needed and what the goals are, there's a huge gap," Christoff said. And the gap between the administration's and the GAO's assessments on these central issues is likely to be reflected in other benchmarks, he said.

Lounging Around The Pool in Damascus

Methinks that these Sunni insurgents have somewhat unrealistic expectations of their prospects in a post-occupation Iraq.

The convention of Iraqi insurgents was scheduled to take place Monday at the resort-like Sahara Hotel outside Damascus but, within hours of the plenary session actually starting, the Syrian government suddenly canceled the summit. However, high-level representatives of much of the Iraqi nationalist insurgency, remained at the venue informally negotiating and laying out a framework for what a post-U.S. Iraq would look like.

Late Monday evening, dozens of conference attendees — a group drawn primarily from the ranks of former military officers, Ba'athist officials, and the Sunni insurgency — gathered for a catered dinner beside the hotel's outdoor pool. Several, including a high-ranking former military officer now overseeing Ba'athist resistance activities in his region, talked openly, if carefully, about strategy, although some asked that their names be withheld. ("We are not afraid," said the former Iraqi army colonel, as waiters delivered the main course of steak and carrots, "but we do not want to give the [Shi'a] militias justification to kill us.") They said victory was in the air; one delegate celebrated the looming U.S. withdrawal over Diet Pepsi and watermelon slices. "This gathering here is unprecedented. When this conference occurs, it will be historic," said Sarmed Abdel Karim, founder of the popular iraq4all website and a non-insurgent who calls the gathering one of "the Iraqi opposition." "It will be the cornerstone of a new Iraq."

"The American project in Iraq is now precarious," said Nizar al-Samarai, a conference spokesman and former official in the Saddam Hussein regime. "We are sure of our victory now, so we decided to meet." Samarai and others described a new kind of resistance activity — a more deliberate and organized coordination between the political and military elements of the insurgency, as they look past guns to governance. "One arm now knows what the other is doing," he said.

The broad strokes of some their demands were familiar, but many were now relayed in greater detail. Attendees said they remained committed to ending the U.S. military presence "by all means" and eliminating all vestiges of American influence, including the current political process.

Once the majority of American troops have left, the alliance plans to throw out the constitution, dissolve the parliament, cancel all resolutions issued from the Bremer era on, and disband the existing security forces and U.S.-trained Iraqi army divisions. The U.S. embassy in Baghdad, they said, would have to close — "as in Saigon. With helicopters on the roof" said Samarai — until Washington recognized a new, resistance-led Iraqi governing council, and offered compensation to all individuals and organizations affected by the war. Under the new leadership, all Iraqi citizens who worked for or cooperated with the current, coalition-backed government would be arrested. A "reconciliation council", drawn in large part from the ranks of the armed insurgency, would then draw up plans for a permanent "technocratic" government -- which would immediately seek criminal charges and file civil suits against the U.S. government and major American war supporters in international court.

The summit had been described by organizers as the most ambitious gathering of the movement to date. It came within weeks of a decision by several Sunni groups — including the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Iraqi Hamas and Ansar al-Sunna — to unite in advance of an expected American military withdrawal, and meet in Damascus to unveil their new alliance. Conference organizers said that this week's event fell victim to logistical hurdles. Less than 200 of the 600 people invited showed up, a result of coalition roadblocks and security measures as well as the fear of reprisal from government forces after their return. But more than one delegate said that these obstacles had been less problematic for most no-shows than remaining philosophical differences on a range of issues, from foreign relations to power-sharing.

Indeed, thorny organizational issues were evident. Despite the conference's claims of national unity, attendees were overwhelmingly Sunni and mostly secular. A few smaller groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq — representing, said several delegates, a hated "foreign presence" — were not included. (Delegates present insisted outside organizations and governments had not sponsored the event or individual delegates). Although Shi'a and even some Kurdish leadership were allegedly invited, even organizers admitted the response had been underwhelming. (In fact, a conference spokesman said one of the non-negotiable items on the agenda was the rejection of autonomous regions within Iraq, a popular Kurdish demand that is viewed as the first step to eventual independence.)

"Less than 200" invitees showed up.

It is almost certain that there were more intelligence assets (from various countries) hanging around than insurgents.

The bill for the hotel wasn't paid in Iraqi Dinars.

Joint Campaign Plan For U.S. Operations in Iraq Through End of 2009

The U.S. military does not have even a rudimentary logistical plan for an orderly phased withdrawal from Iraq, but they do have a written plan for operations extending through the end of 2009.

The classified plan, which represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador, calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008. "Sustainable security" is to be established on a nationwide basis by the summer of 2009, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The detailed document, known as the Joint Campaign Plan, is an elaboration of the new strategy President Bush signaled in January when he decided to send five additional American combat brigades and other units to Iraq. That signaled a shift from the previous strategy, which emphasized transferring to Iraqis the responsibility for safeguarding their security.

That new approach put a premium on protecting the Iraqi population in Baghdad, on the theory that improved security would provide Iraqi political leaders with the breathing space they needed to try political reconciliation.

The latest plan, which covers a two-year period, does not explicitly address troop levels or withdrawal schedules. It anticipates a decline in American forces as the "surge" in troops runs its course later this year or in early 2008. But it nonetheless assumes continued American involvement to train soldiers, act as partners with Iraqi forces and fight terrorist groups in Iraq, American officials said.

The goals in the document appear ambitious, given the immensity of the challenge of dealing with die-hard Sunni insurgents, renegade Shiite militias, Iraqi leaders who have made only fitful progress toward political reconciliation, as well as Iranian and Syrian neighbors who have not hesitated to interfere in Iraq's affairs. And the White House's interim assessment of progress, issued n July 12, is mixed.

But at a time when critics at home are defining patience in terms of weeks, the strategy may run into the expectations of many lawmakers for an early end to the American mission here.

The plan, developed by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander, and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, has been briefed to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. William J. Fallon, the head of the Central Command. It is expected to be formally issued to officials here this week.

The plan envisions two phases. The "near-term" goal is to achieve "localized security" in Baghdad and other areas no later than June 2008. It envisions encouraging political accommodations at the local level, including with former insurgents, while pressing Iraq's leaders to make headway on their program of national reconciliation.

The "intermediate" goal is to stitch together such local arrangements to establish a broader sense of security on a nationwide basis no later than June 2009.

"The coalition, in partnership with the government of Iraq, employs integrated political, security, economic and diplomatic means, to help the people of Iraq achieve sustainable security by the summer of 2009," a summary of the campaign plan states. ...

To develop the plan, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker assembled a Joint Strategic Assessment Team, which sought to define the conflict and outline the elements of a new strategy. It included officers like Col. H. R. McMaster, the field commander who carried out the successful "clear, hold and build" operation in Tal Afar and who wrote a critical account of the Joint Chiefs of Staff role during the Vietnam War; Col. John R. Martin, who teaches at the Army War College and was a West Point classmate of General Petraeus; and David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert who has a degree in anthropology.

State Department officials, including Robert Ford, an Arab expert and the American ambassador to Algeria, were also involved. So were a British officer and experts outside government like Stephen D. Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The team determined that Iraq was in a "communal struggle for power," in the words of one senior officer who participated in the effort. Adding to the problem, the new Iraqi government was struggling to unite its disparate factions and to develop the capability to deliver basic services and provide security.

Extremists were fueling the violence, as were nations like Iran, which they concluded was arming and equipping Shiite militant groups, and Syria, which was allowing suicide bombers to cross into Iraq.

Like the Baker-Hamilton commission, which issued its report last year, the team believed that political, military and economic efforts were needed, including diplomatic discussions with Iran, officials said. There were different views about how aggressive to be in pressing for the removal of overtly sectarian officials, and several officials said that theme was toned down somewhat in the final plan.

The plan itself was written by the Joint Campaign Redesign Team, an allusion to the fact that the plan inherited from General Casey was being reworked. Much of the redesign has already been put into effect, including the decision to move troops out of large bases and to act as partners more fully with the Iraqi security forces.

The overarching goal, an American official said, is to advance political accommodation and avoid undercutting the authority of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. While the plan seeks to achieve stability, several officials said it anticipates that less will be accomplished in terms of national reconciliation by the end of 2009 than did the plan developed by General Casey.

The plan also emphasizes encouraging political accommodation at the local level. The command has established a team to oversee efforts to reach out to former insurgents and tribal leaders. It is dubbed the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, and is overseen by a British general. In the terminology of the plan, the aim is to identify potentially "reconcilable" groups and encourage them to move away from violence.

New CBO Report on Bringing Back The Draft

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office tackles some of the questions that lawmakers will be faced with next Spring when the requirements of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars finally exhaust the manpower we have under the current all-volunteer military.

Titled The All-Volunteer Military: Issues and Performance (49 page pdf), the question of whether the United States should re-institute the draft is examined:

CBO explored the implications of using draftees to eliminate the end-strength shortfall that would result if voluntary accessions fell or were restricted to less than last year’s high level (either slightly or significantly) and if continuation rates declined to a mix of the rates from 2005 and 2006. ...

With a draft, more recruits would be needed to reach a given end strength than is the case in an all-volunteer force. Under current law, individuals would be inducted for two years of service, substantially less than the initial obligations that are typical in today’s AVF (although many service members leave the military before the end of their initial obligation because of medical problems, poor performance, or other reasons). Those shorter obligations mean that a draft system results in greater turnover, which necessitates a larger number of accessions. ...

Another implication of the draft is that the force would become more junior and less experienced than the current AVF. Because inductees serve for a shorter time than volunteers, having larger numbers of draftees relative to volunteers would necessarily result in a force with fewer average years of service. In scenario 4, more than half of the Army’s enlisted personnel (51 percent) would have fewer than three years of experience by 2012, compared with less than 45 percent of enlisted personnel in an allvolunteer force. Usually, greater accumulated knowledge and skills come with increased experience. As noted above, research has shown that military personnel with more than four years of service are 1.5 times more productive in certain jobs than personnel in their first term. Another aspect of seniority is that certain military positions require advanced pay grades, which generally can be filled only by more-experienced personnel. Because most draftees leave after completing a two-year obligation, a draft might affect the services’ ability to perform those functions efficiently. ...

Savings on Pay and Benefits.

Because a draft Army would experience higher turnover at the end of the first term of service, it would evolve into a force with lower average seniority than the current volunteer force. Total spending on basic pay—and on other types of pay or benefits that depend on members’ length of service or rank—would decline. In addition, a smaller proportion of entering soldiers would remain in the Army until retirement, so less money would have to be accrued for military retirement pay and retiree health care. ...

Savings on Recruiting

In 2006, the Army spent $353 million on enlistment bonuses, $583 million on recruiting and advertising, and another $700 million on pay and benefits for recruiters. Because it would probably still need some volunteers, the Army would be unlikely to eliminate enlistment bonuses or advertising under a draft. Nevertheless, those spending levels represent upper bounds on the possible savings on recruiting. ...

Effective Time for Draftees to Be Available for Deployment

Aside from the larger number of accessions and less senior force implied by a draft, there are concerns about how long draftees would be available for deployment. On entering the military, new recruits receive individual basic training (boot camp) and occupational training before being assigned to a unit. A unit nearing its deployment time also takes part in a series of collective training events, ranging from small-team training to battalion-size unit training. For occupations in combat-related fields, such as infantry and air defense, individual basic and occupational training lasts between 3.5 months and 7 months. Unit training requires another 6 months, CBO estimates. Thus, allowing one month for transit (and assuming that training for recruits and units could be scheduled efficiently to minimize time spent waiting for training), CBO estimates that it would take 10.5 months to 14 months after recruits entered the military before they would be fully trained and available for deployment.

Those times would be identical for draftees and volunteers. However, because draftees are assumed to serve for two years (as prescribed in current law), some inductees assigned to occupations that required the longer training times would not be available for a full one-year deployment. That limitation would exacerbate problems for the Army, which recently increased the typical deployment length from 12 months to 15 months. Personnel in the AVF, by comparison, serve longer terms and can be deployed for longer intervals—or multiple times during a single enlistment contract—for most occupational specialties.

Equity Considerations

In CBO’s draft scenarios, no more than 165,000 young people would be drafted annually. That number represents only a small portion of the recruit-age population in the United States—about 2 million young men turn 18 each year, and the total (male and female) population between the ages of 18 and 24 numbers roughly 30 million. Given that relatively few individuals would need to be drafted, who should be inducted to ensure that the system was equitable?

The random lottery required by current law would seem to yield a representative cross section of young men. However, the remaining system of exemptions or deferments would affect the representativeness of young people serving in the military. All of those aspects of current draft law would require legislation to change. Presumably, lawmakers would want to avoid the public dissatisfaction and mistrust that was evident during some of the nation’s previous experiences with conscription. However, if DoD had a ready supply of high-quality personnel available through the draft, it might wish to tighten AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) standards. Alternatively, the nation might consider certain civilian occupations or activities of such importance for domestic health and security that people engaged in them could be exempt from military service. Such actions, however, would most likely affect the representativeness of draftees. Another equity-related consideration is the role of women in the military. A draft that was instituted under current law would cause the percentage of women in the services to decline (assuming that women did not volunteer at greater rates than in the recent past). Some observers might argue for legislation that would broaden the draft to include the registration and induction of women, despite existing restrictions that bar women from serving in units primarily engaged in ground combat.

Not to mention the most important benefit to the nation of re-instituting the draft.

Asinine military adventures would be constrained by the desire of many people of draft age (and their parents) not to sacrifice their lives (or their children) to further some politician's lunatic plan.

LMAO

From the Washington Post's review of a new book, LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner:

To compare some of the agency's antics revealed in this book to the Keystone Kops is to do violence to the memory of Mack Sennett, who created the slapstick comedies. My personal favorite is an episode in Guatemala in 1994, when the CIA chief of station confronted the American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, with intelligence, as she recalled, that "I was having an affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy." The CIA's friends in the Guatemalan military had bugged McAfee's bedroom, Weiner reports, and "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian." The CIA's "Murphy memo" was widely distributed in Washington. There was only one problem: the ambassador was married, not gay and not sleeping with her secretary. " 'Murphy' was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog."

Propaganda and the Invisible Government

Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment — objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, "entirely bogus".

For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories — domestic and foreign — you'll find they're dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller's parroting of official sources and vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. "No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin," was the headline on his report, and it was false. ...

One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. "I have to tell you," said the spokesman, "that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don't have to do any of that. What is the secret?" ...

Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote him, "The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well known in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented." And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. "But," said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist. ...

Harold Pinter's subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that's almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. And this is the secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in scope that I'm always astonished that so many Americans know and understand as much as they do. We are talking about a system, of course, not personalities. And yet, a great many people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and his gang. And yes, the Bush gang is extreme. But my experience is that they are no more than an extreme version of what has gone on before. In my lifetime, more wars have been started by liberal Democrats than by Republicans. Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda system and the war-making system will continue.

Bush's Priorities in Iraq Help Jihadist Movement

Completely apart from the issue of the U.S. military information operation that conflates Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda [see The "Al Qaeda in Iraq" Conflation as an Info Op], the war in Iraq does have a crucial effect upon the worldwide Islamist terror network.

From a new piece by Robert Parry on why George W. Bush is Osama Bin Laden's best recruiter and most valuable enabler.

Over the past six years, the wily and ruthless leaders of al-Qaeda came to understand that Bush was an invaluable poster boy. The more he was viewed as the "big crusader," the more they could present themselves as the "defenders of Islam." The al-Qaeda murderers moved from the fringes of Muslim society closer to the mainstream.

So, in fall 2004, with Bush fighting for his political life against Democrat John Kerry, bin Laden took the risk of breaking nearly a year of silence to release a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before the U.S. election.

Bush’s supporters immediately spun bin Laden's tirade as an "endorsement" of Kerry and pollsters recorded a jump of several percentage points for Bush, from nearly a dead heat to a five- or six-point lead. Four days later, Bush hung on to win a second term by an official margin of less than three percentage points.

Boomerang effect.

The last-minute intervention by bin Laden – essentially urging Americans to reject Bush – had the predictable effect of driving voters to the President. After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden intended.

"Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" after the videotape had dominated the day's news, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.

Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."

Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush’s heavy-handed policies were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

"Certainly," Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them – such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected – remained untouched," Suskind wrote.

Even Bush recognized that his struggling campaign had been helped by bin Laden. "I thought it was going to help," Bush said in a post-election interview about the videotape. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush."

Bin Laden, a well-educated Saudi and a keen observer of U.S. politics, appears to have recognized the same point in cleverly tipping the election to Bush.

Prolonging the War

Al-Qaeda's leaders understood that a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq might mean a renewed assault on them as well as the loss of their cause celebre for recruiting new jihadists. With Bush ensconced for a second term, that concern lessened but didn't entirely go away.

According to a captured July 9, 2005, letter, attributed to al-Qaeda's second-in-command Zawahiri, al-Qaeda leaders still fretted over the possibility that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could touch off the disintegration of their operations, as jihadists who had flocked to Iraq to battle the Americans might simply give up the fight and go home.

"The mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal," said the "Zawahiri letter," according to a text released by the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

In another captured letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, a senior al-Qaeda operative known as "Atiyah" wrote that "prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest."

Pakistan Peril

It takes a pretty dim understanding of human nature -- not to mention other embarrassing deficiencies -- to suppose that we could get away with intervening militarily in yet another Muslim country (and the one that has nukes, at that).

Washington may be considering other options to achieve its objective in Pakistan - including direct action by US military units operating from across the border with Afghanistan. There are precedents for such a policy, which have been highly controversial in Pakistan, including the use of armed drones to attack selected targets.

Whether or not a tougher United States policy would have an effect, the readiness to adopt it reflects spreading awareness in Washington that the campaign against the al-Qaida movement is simply not working. The new national-intelligence assessment report shows that after nearly six years of the war on terror, a vigorous al-Qaida network may be in a position to plan assaults inside the United States. This is in the face of a massive military operation in Iraq; major commitments in Afghanistan; tens of thousands of detentions; operations in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere; a huge financial commitment; and nearly 30,000 US soldiers and marines killed or injured.

In these circumstances, a serious rethink of policies might be expected. Instead, a further escalation seems more likely (see U.S. Readies Overt Attacks Within Pakistan) - rather like the much-vaunted surge in Iraq, but applied to western Pakistan. There are two pointers in particular to the way the American side of the strategy there might proceed.

The first is the construction of a large US military base at the Ghaki pass, just inside the Afghan border with Pakistan. This is a substantial addition to the two major US facilities elsewhere in Afghanistan - at Kandahar and Bagram - and looks remarkably well situated to conduct operations in Pakistan.

The second is the decision to deploy an entirely new weapons system, an armed drone known as the MQ-9 Reaper. Smaller reconnaissance drones such as the MQ-1 Predator have become major features of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some of these have been equipped with two Hellfire missiles.

The Reaper is on a different scale altogether. For a start, it is four times heavier than a Predator and is the size of a fighter aircraft. Moreover, it is heavily armed and able to carry up to fourteen Hellfire missiles. It has twice the speed of the Predator yet can cruise at much lower speeds, loitering over potential target areas for up to fourteen hours at a time (see Charles J Hanley, "Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq", AP, 16 July 2007).

This pilotless aircraft is launched under the control of local crew, but once in the air each drone is operated by two other "crew" based thousands of miles away at Creech air-force base in Nevada, connected by a real-time satellite link. At least nine of the robotic aircraft have already been built by General Atomics; sixty or more are likely to be deployed, initially in Afghanistan in the next few months and in Iraq from 2008.

From a US perspective such automated warfare would have the advantage that US aircrew would not have to overfly Pakistan: they could merely direct the Reapers to hit targets anywhere in western Pakistan from the safety of Nevada.

The exact political impact of such operations in Pakistan is difficult to gauge; but past experience indicates that they would provoke a very strong public reaction, possibly sufficient to destabilize a Pervez Musharraf regime already beset by many other problems. Yet it now looks possible that the Bush administration is prepared to take the risk of losing a leader it still regards as a major ally. The predicament of the war on terror is such that almost anything goes, even the possibility of violent regime change in Pakistan. A fundamental rethink remains out of sight.

Institutional Imperatives Trump Ephemeral Priorities

Shortly after President Nixon tried to get the CIA to take the blame for the Watergate break-in in 1972, he began to suffer from a series of bewildering (to him) political misfortunes.

Some things never change.

Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday.

Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity.

"There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against complaints it was based on unnamed sources.

The report issued last month said the Central Intelligence Agency ran secret jails in Poland and Romania, with the complicity of those governments, and transported terrorist suspects across Europe in secret flights.

Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied hosting CIA prisons on their soil.

"People in the CIA felt these things were not consonant with the sort of intelligence work they normally do," Marty said.

He said he had based his findings largely on conversations with "high officials of the CIA (and) highly placed European office-holders, who for different reasons, often honorable reasons, were ready to explain what had happened."

Since he had no power to summon witnesses, subpoena documents or search buildings, he was forced to rely on such evidence, Marty said.

New NIE On Terrorist Threat to U.S. Homeland

This morning, the office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) titled The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland (7 page pdf):

Key Judgments

We judge the US Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic terrorist groups and cells, especially al-Qa’ida, driven by their undiminished intent to attack the Homeland and a continued effort by these terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities.

We assess that greatly increased worldwide counterterrorism efforts over the past five years have constrained the ability of al-Qa’ida to attack the US Homeland again and have led terrorist groups to perceive the Homeland as a harder target to strike than on 9/11. These measures have helped disrupt known plots against the United States since 9/11.

• We are concerned, however, that this level of international cooperation may wane as 9/11 becomes a more distant memory and perceptions of the threat diverge.

Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qa’ida senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qa’ida will intensify its efforts to put operatives here.

• As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.

We assess that al-Qa’ida will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the Homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups. Of note, we assess that al-Qa’ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland. In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qa’ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.

We assess that al-Qa’ida’s Homeland plotting is likely to continue to focus on prominent political, economic, and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the US population. The group is proficient with conventional small arms and improvised explosive devices, and is innovative in creating new capabilities and overcoming security obstacles.

• We assess that al-Qa’ida will continue to try to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufficient capability.

We assess Lebanese Hizballah, which has conducted anti-US attacks outside the United States in the past, may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland over the next three years if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran.

We assess that the spread of radical—especially Salafi—Internet sites, increasingly aggressive anti-US rhetoric and actions, and the growing number of radical, self-generating cells in Western countries indicate that the radical and violent segment of the West’s Muslim population is expanding, including in the United States. The arrest and prosecution by US law enforcement of a small number of violent Islamic extremists inside the United States— who are becoming more connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement—points to the possibility that others may become sufficiently radicalized that they will view the use of violence here as legitimate. We assess that this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe, however.

We assess that other, non-Muslim terrorist groups—often referred to as "single-issue" groups by the FBI—probably will conduct attacks over the next three years given their violent histories, but we assess this violence is likely to be on a small scale.

We assess that globalization trends and recent technological advances will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack—all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader.

• The ability to detect broader and more diverse terrorist plotting in this environment will challenge current US defensive efforts and the tools we use to detect and disrupt plots. It will also require greater understanding of how suspect activities at the local level relate to strategic threat information and how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions.

Intelligence Reports Say Abbas is in Trouble

The precarious position of Abbas (and Fatah) is no secret.

But it is good to now have it on record that the White House is receiving accurate assessments of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza.

That still doesn't mean that when the "West Bank first" strategy blows up in our face, the administration will not trot out the old "nobody could have predicted ..."

Several intelligence assessments have warned that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, the man U.S. policymakers hope can help salvage the Middle East peace process, may not be politically strong enough to achieve that goal, according to U.S. officials.

The assessments have also cautioned that his opponents in Hamas -- the Islamic movement that is being shunned by Abbas, Israel and the United States -- will not be easily marginalized.

The White House is now betting that Abbas, replenished by the return of aid from the West and tax revenue withheld by Israel, can create a stable enclave in the West Bank and resume peace negotiations with Israel. ...

The administration intends to continue politically isolating the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Abbas dismissed the Hamas government, which was democratically elected and has refused to recognize Israel, after it routed his security forces in Gaza.

The "West Bank first" strategy is the White House's biggest and potentially riskiest policy departure in its dealings with the Palestinian Authority since it was created in 1994. The administration is moving into uncharted territory in trying to aid Abbas even though he and his Fatah political party control just a portion of the Authority.

Intelligence reports over the past month, since Hamas's seizure of the Gaza Strip effectively split the Palestinian Authority into two parts, have assessed Abbas's position as vulnerable even in the West Bank. Hamas's popularity has dropped slightly since the split, but a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research taken a week after the fissure said that Hamas was still more popular than Fatah among more than one-quarter of West Bank Palestinians.

Hamas, which is supported by Iran, swept the three largest West Bank cities in elections 18 months ago.

With the de facto help of Israeli troops still in the West Bank, Fatah may be able to purge or at least reduce the Hamas military presence in the West Bank, but Abbas faces a difficult challenge in limiting its political presence, especially in Hebron and Nablus, according to officials who described the intelligence assessments on the condition that they not be named.

The Palestinian president does not control all armed groups, including the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, that are linked to Fatah, and he may not be able to stem all terrorist plots, the intelligence reports have also warned. Hamas members and other extremists have significant incentive to target Israel from the West Bank to undermine new peace efforts -- and Abbas's ability to build a Hamas-less state, the assessments suggest.

"Fatah faces significant challenges in effectively governing the West Bank. Israeli military operations are the major factor restricting Hamas activity, and Abbas can at best influence, not control, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade forces that are the power on the street in several towns," said a senior intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the assessments are classified.

Intelligence officials have cautioned that Hamas, cut off in Gaza from the outside world under a strategy supported by Israel and the Bush administration, could even enhance its position among Palestinians. The assessments warn that many may blame Israel or outsiders for their plight. ...

"The challenges confronting Abbas are significant. He must stymie further support for Hamas, reverse his government's reputation for corruption and demonstrate that it can provide greater security and economic opportunity in the West Bank," said a U.S. official who has seen the array of intelligence reports.

"Hamas is working hard on a parallel track to show that it can effectively govern and represent the interests of the Palestinian people. Should Abbas fail and Hamas succeed, the implications are problematic for Abbas's internal constituencies and external supporters," the official said. ...

U.S. intelligence has warned that Abbas will have difficulty following through on what he has promised for the past 18 months and what most Palestinians want from him domestically: to clean house and rebuild Fatah with a younger generation of politicians. Broad reform -- by the Fatah-dominated emergency government or within Fatah itself -- is unlikely to happen anytime soon, analysts have warned.

In the nearly three years since he took over after Yasser Arafat's death, Abbas has not been able to exert enough authority to command or produce action. "He doesn't have the political legitimacy of either Arafat or [Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed] Yassin," said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA Middle East analyst now at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center.

Despite Hamas's money problems, the intelligence assessments note that the party intends to be taken seriously and is trying to institute smoother local rule in Gaza.

"On the one hand, a West Bank-first strategy is a commendable effort to make lemonade out of lemons. But it also seems to be an extension of the mistaken belief that sufficient efforts to isolate and pressure Hamas will make Hamas go away. Hamas will not go away," said Paul Pillar, a former chief Middle East analyst on the National Intelligence Council. "Hamastan in Gaza has tremendous potential to rebound to everyone's disadvantage -- not just to the Palestinians', but also the Israelis'."

Riedel and Pillar both said they believe that the Bush administration is not listening closely to the intelligence community on the Palestinian crisis.

Searching For Scapegoats

Everyone knows that Bush loves to place the blame for fuckups anywhere except his Oval Office.

The thinking has been that the president is planning to spread the blame for the loss of the Iraq war between the unresponsive Iraqi government, and the obstructionist Democrats.

In the newest development in the blame game, it appears that the pie is large enough to be split as well with the U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

With opposition to Bush's Iraq strategy escalating on Capitol Hill, the president has sought, at least rhetorically, to transfer some of the burden of an unpopular war to his top general in Baghdad, wielding Petraeus as a shield against a growing number of congressional doubters. In speeches and meetings, the president has implored his critics to wait until September, when Petraeus is scheduled to deliver a much-anticipated assessment of the U.S. mission in Iraq. ...

Some of Petraeus's military comrades worry that the general is being set up by the Bush administration as a scapegoat if conditions in Iraq fail to improve. "The danger is that Petraeus will now be painted as failing to live up to expectations and become the fall guy for the administration," one retired four-star officer said.

Bush has mentioned Petraeus at least 150 times this year in his speeches, interviews and news conferences, often setting him up in opposition to members of Congress.

"It seems to me almost an act of desperation, the administration turning to the one most prominent official who cannot act politically and whose credibility is so far unsullied, someone who is or should be purely driven by the facts of the situation," said Richard Kohn, a specialist in U.S. military history at the University of North Carolina. "What it tells me, given the hemorrhaging of support in Congress, is that we're entering some new phase of the end game."

In his public comments, Bush has not leaned nearly as heavily on the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, Petraeus's political counterpart in Baghdad. At his news conference Thursday, the president mentioned Petraeus 12 times but Crocker only twice, both times in his prepared statement.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, a skilled strategist, concluded that the president is sending the message that Iraq is "a purely military problem." The lesson, he said, may be that "the military action and the political objectives are parting company." That is, he explained, the United States may make some progress by fighting insurgents and training Iraqis, but that won't affect the Iraqi leaders' ability to achieve reconciliation.

But there was general agreement that the president's reliance on Petraeus puts the general in a vulnerable position, both with the administration and with Congress. ...

"This is an administration that wants to blame the generals," (Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official) said.

It is not unusual for presidents to duck behind generals when wars go bad, Kohn said. Previous examples, he said, include President Harry S. Truman relying on Gen. Omar Bradley and the other members of the Joint Chiefs to counter the impact of his split with Gen. Douglas MacArthur over the Korean War, and President Lyndon B. Johnson bringing Gen. William Westmoreland back to address Congress in 1967 to respond to the growing antiwar movement.

An Unnecessarily Embellished Narrative

Investigating the drug trade in Mexico is doubtlessly a risky undertaking.

But there is no way in hell that Mexican traffickers are going to be assassinating American journalists inside the United States.

This bogus threat was made to disincline American reporters from looking too deeply into the Narco-Political Complex which has deep roots in the U.S. and Mexican governments.

The San Antonio Express-News, a 230,000-circulation daily, this week withdrew its U.S.-Mexico border reporter after learning of what appears to be an unprecedented plan to assassinate American journalists who frequently write about drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Sources have told several Texas newspapers that hit men from Los Zetas, a group of former Mexican military officers who operate as the Gulf cartel's assassins, may have been hired to cross into the United States and execute American reporters. Word of the threat shattered the widely held perception here that foreign journalists are somehow shielded from violent retribution in a nation that is now second only to Iraq in deaths of journalists.

"We are not immune," wrote Eloy Aguilar and Dolly Mascareñas in a statement sent Friday to fellow members of the Foreign Correspondents Association in Mexico. "We have a very confused and violent situation in Mexico, with the government fighting drug cartels on one side and suspected guerrilla groups on the other. . . . An incident involving a U.S. or other foreign journalist could be used by all groups to create more confusion."

More than 30 journalists have been killed in Mexico in the past six years, but only one -- freelancer and activist Brad Will, who was shot to death during teacher protests last year in Oaxaca -- was American. Most of the killings are believed to be related to coverage of an ongoing war between drug cartels. Last year, drug gangs were suspected of firing automatic weapons and throwing a grenade into the newsroom of Nuevo Laredo's El Mañana newspaper, seriously injuring one reporter.

Express-News Editor Robert Rivard, a former Central America bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, said in an interview Friday that steps have been taken to conceal the location of his former border correspondent, Mariano Castillo.

Castillo wrote nearly 100 stories about cartels, crisscrossing the border from the newspaper's bureau in Laredo, Tex., for the past 4 1/2 years as drug violence escalated. His first piece about cartels, in late 2003, was headlined "Mexico town erupts into a battle zone; Grenades, machine guns roar south of the border." In his last front-page article, which ran in May, Castillo exposed the existence of a "shadowy and violent group that calls itself the 'Gente Nueva,' or New People -- and authorities don't want to talk about it."

For now the paper's border bureau, which is a 2 1/2-hour drive from San Antonio, sits vacant. Rivard is grappling with a challenge faced every day by his counterparts south of border -- how to cover a region where his reporters are targets.

"It's a dilemma," Rivard said. "On the one side, no story is worth a reporter's life; on the other side, you don't want to back down from telling readers about an important story."

Somebody must fear that journalists are getting too close to the nexus of corruption that runs the Mexican drug trade.

If they had confined their warning to possible dangers to reporters in Mexico, they would have been fine.

But they overplayed their hand by unnecessarily embellishing the narrative.

The Right Shade Of Lipstick For This Pig

A widely anticipated White House report on Iraq, set for release today, argues that the Baghdad government has made "satisfactory" progress toward nearly half of the political and military goals sought by Congress, while acknowledging that an equal number remain "not satisfactory," an administration official said yesterday.

The report, ordered by lawmakers as an interim assessment of President Bush's troop-increase strategy, identifies some positive movement in eight of the 18 congressional benchmarks, most of them related to military issues; finds insufficient improvement in eight others, mainly related to political reconciliation; and judges mixed results in the final two, the official said.

The administration's assessment comes the day after U.S. intelligence experts offered an overwhelmingly negative view of military and political conditions in Iraq, saying that Iraqi forces will remain incapable of taking charge of security for years to come and that deepening sectarian political divides remain the largest impediment to progress. ...

The upcoming report is the first of two -- the second will come in September -- that Congress ordered the White House to produce when it passed war funding legislation he requested this spring. The legislation said that if Bush could not certify progress on each of the 18 goals, he would have to offer changes in strategy or risk a reduction in funding. ...

Officials stressed that the report does not claim that any of the benchmarks have been fully met, only that in some cases there has been forward movement. "It divides about 50-50," said an administration official who was not authorized to speak about the assessment on the record before Bush releases it.

For instance, the report describes as "not satisfactory" the Iraqi government's progress toward enacting a law governing the distribution of oil revenue, an area of deep division among Iraqi factions. But it says the government, as promised, sent additional military brigades to Baghdad to help bolster security.

The findings will also cite what the White House considers positive indicators outside the original benchmarks, such as the cooperation between U.S. forces and tribal sheiks in Anbar province against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, a recent drop in sectarian killings in Baghdad, and signs of normal life in the capital, such as amusement parks, markets and professional soccer leagues.

Aides expect Bush to speak publicly about the report, which runs about 25 pages, and to argue that the additional U.S. troops need to be given more time because the last of them arrived just a few weeks ago. ...

Meanwhile, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, senior intelligence officials said there has been no meaningful positive change in Iraq since January, when a starkly pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate warned that even if security improved, violent sectarian divisions threatened to destroy the government.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence and chief of the National Intelligence Council, which wrote the January estimate, said that assessment did not change. While the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has made "halting efforts to bridge the divisions and restore commitment to a unified country . . . it has made limited progress on key legislation," such as the oil revenue law and a range of power-sharing measures.

"Communal violence and scant common ground between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds continues to polarize politics," Fingar said yesterday. Even the majority-Shiite bloc that Maliki heads, he said, "does not present a unified front" and has continued to deteriorate in recent months. Meanwhile, the provision of essential services seen as crucial in building support for the government, including electricity and oil production, remains below prewar levels, he said. Some have declined over the past six months.

"The analysis that the community made in January . . . appears to be borne out by events since then," he said. "That assessment focused on the imperative for reducing levels of violence in the country as a prerequisite for beginning to restore confidence among the competing, fractured body politic and the groups in the political system." While the increase in U.S. troops is "having an effect, it has not yet had a sufficient effect on the violence, in my judgment, to move the country to a place that the serious obstacles to reconciliation can be overcome," Fingar said.

"It will be difficult and time-consuming to bridge the political gulf when violence levels are reduced, and they have not yet been reduced significantly," he said, in what he called his "most optimistic projection."

Retired Maj. Gen. John R. Landry, also a member of the intelligence council, said there have been some improvements in the Iraqi army, although much less so with the Iraqi police, who are charged with holding urban areas. But Iraqi security forces remain "ridden with a certain degree of sectarian infiltration" and lack the logistics and support capabilities that would allow them to take over from U.S. forces in most of the country, he said. ...

Asked about the threat of an Iranian takeover of Iraq, which Bush has frequently cited as a possible outcome if U.S forces withdraw, Fingar said "it will be difficult for Iran to hold Iraq in its sway." While many Iraqi Shiites have close ties with Iran, he said, they have very different views about governance and religion.


Initial Benchmark Assessment Report July 12, 2007 (25 page PDF)

Red Mosque Backlash Beginning

There is a bit of debate over whether Gen. Musharraf's order to storm the Red Mosque will help or hurt his position at home.

Some observers are claiming that the Pakistani strongman has shown needed resolve and the nation will gain stability from a more aggressive strategy against Muslim fundamentalists.

Analysts say Musharraf's degree of success in rehabilitating his political image with a forceful stand against Islamic militants will depend in part on the final toll in the mosque conflict; the extent to which the slain cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is embraced as a martyr; and whether there is a significant backlash from the country's many extremist Islamist groups, which in the past have proved capable of staging suicide attacks.

"These events could enfeeble or embolden him," Samir Puri, a defense analyst at Rand Europe, said of Musharraf, an army general who seized power eight years ago. "If he is seen to have been decisive and as having acted in the interests of maintaining law and order, this will emphasize his claim, and the army's, to being the custodians of the nation." ...

Pakistani authorities, who in recent months have restricted media coverage of protests triggered by Musharraf's suspension of the country's reform-minded chief justice, limited journalists' access to the scene of the fighting, keeping them several hundred yards away. Journalists also were denied access to hospitals where wounded were taken.

Over the last year, as Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped in Pakistan's tribal areas, Musharraf has come under pressure from the Bush administration to rein in Islamic militants, who are believed to retain close ties to Pakistan's military intelligence establishment.

Analysts said it was too soon to tell whether the mosque assault presaged a wider crackdown.

Rand is fielding a large roster of experts on the question:

Some believe the assault on the Red Mosque shows a turnabout, with the government acknowledging that extremism has gotten out of hand. "There is a realization that monsters develop ideas of their own," says Najmuddin Shaikh, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

Others suggest that there could be more pragmatic motivations, like self-preservation. "It is to [Musharraf's] advantage to be viewed as taking a stand against extremism," says Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at Rand Corp., a research group in Washington. "There may be a political intent in doing this."

Yet the need for continued action is pressing, say Dr. Jones and others. Since Muslim extremists were rousted from Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistan's border areas – once loosely governed by a patchwork of tribes – have become a breeding-ground for global terrorism.

"[Intelligence agencies] and the Army are not able to control militants in that area," says Jones. "It is no longer a tribal area; it is a religious extremist area." ...

Indeed, news of the mosque raid prompted violent protests in such remote regions. Militants and students from madrassahs burned and looted the offices of the French Red Cross and Care International in one district of Northwest Frontier Province on Tuesday. Army and paramilitary troops had to be called to stabilize the situation.

In Peshawar, there are those with their doubts about the government's intentions, too. "Musharraf is doing all this to please the Americans," says Muhammad Arshad, a graduate from a religious seminary. "He is killing fellow Muslims to earn dollars."

There is concern with what actions the Islamists will undertake in retribution for Musharraf's move against the well-connected [see yesterday's post] mosque.

(A) religious leader who had been part of previous negotiations said the government was to blame for the failure of the talks and had made a hasty decision to conduct the raid, a decision it would later regret. "First it was one Red Mosque in Islamabad," said Maulana Abdul Majeed Hazarvi. "Now you will find Red Mosques everywhere." ...

On Tuesday, there was evidence that a backlash had already begun. In the North-West Frontier Province, bands of armed young men shut down a major highway, and religious leaders called for demonstrations elsewhere.

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad urged American citizens to limit their movements in the northwestern city of Peshawar, the main gateway to the tribal areas.

U.S. Reportedly Behind Musharraf Crackdown on Red Mosque

Unsurprisingly, it is being reported that the U.S. embassy pressured Musharraf to give no quarter to the holdouts at the extremist mosque/madrassa complex in Islamabad.

A little appreciated factoid is that the Red Mosque happens to be the house of worship for many top Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officials.

Musharraf -- who overnights in military barracks for security purposes -- will now have to be even more wary of reprisals following the violent end to the mosque siege.

A last-minute intervention by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf ended nine hours of negotiations seeking a peaceful end to the siege of the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad.

Apparently saying he was "heavily under duress from his allies", the president in the early hours of Tuesday instead ordered in the military to end the seven-day saga. Unconfirmed reports even say that Musharraf personally led the assault, along with Corps Commander Rawalpindi Lieutenant-General Tariq Majid. The media were barred from the mosque's immediate vicinity.

Asia Times Online contacts believe that Musharraf was referring to Washington, which has in the past few months stepped up pressure on its partner in the "war on terror" to take action against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and foreign militants inside Pakistan.

When the siege of Lal Masjid began a week ago, the administration of US President George W Bush was fulsome in its praise that something was being done, as the mosque is a known supporter of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and even a safe haven for militants.

According to the contacts, Musharraf said, "They want targets in Operation Silence," referring to the code name for Tuesday's final assault on the mosque. That is, the militants should be arrested or killed. ...

Although the offensive in Pakistan's federal capital - which has captured international headlines - is finally playing out, one question remains. Who is the real director of the drama? Observers and analysts believe there might be several - one running the show separately in Lal Masjid, and others pulling strings from the outside. If so, there can be no clean, simple end to the saga.

The next episode has already begun in Batkhaila, North West Frontier Province, where the pro-Taliban Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Moham has clashed with the military and seized all highways in the area, including on the Silk Road leading to China.

It is only a matter of time before the US-led "war on terror" formally crosses the Pakistani border. ...

Lengthy talks before the military assault led to an agreement - at about 2am - on a safe passage for Ghazi. This was couched in terms of an "honorable arrest" - brief protective custody.

The high-profile negotiating team included the Grand Mufti of Pakistan, Mufti Rafi Usmani; Minister of Religious Affairs Ejaz ul-Haq; and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, a former premier and president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League.

At this point, Ghazi said he would consult with his colleagues, and Hussain went off to confer with Musharraf for final approval of the agreement. Musharraf had earlier approved safe passage as an option. ...

Asia Times Online contacts claim that the situation was complicated by the sudden appearance of a delegation of members of Parliament belonging to the government's coalition partners, the Muttahida Quami Movement. They are believed to have met with a US official at his official residence, after which the situation changed within an hour.

No Search Warrant or Wiretap Order Needed To Monitor Internet Use, Court Rules

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of pen registers in 1979, saying callers have no right to conceal from the government the numbers they communicate electronically to the phone companies that carry their calls.

Federal law requires court approval for a pen register. But because it is not considered a search, authorities do not need a search warrant, which would require them to show that the surveillance is likely to produce evidence of a crime.

They also do not need a wiretap order, which would require them to show that less intrusive methods of surveillance have failed or would be futile.

In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

Likewise, the court said, although the government learns what computer sites someone visited, "it does not find out the contents of the messages or the particular pages on the Web sites the person viewed."

The search is no more intrusive than officers' examination of a list of phone numbers or the outside of a mailed package, neither of which requires a warrant, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling.

Defense lawyer Michael Crowley disagreed. His client, Dennis Alba, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of operating a laboratory in Escondido that manufactured the drug ecstasy.

Some of the evidence against Alba came from agents' tracking of his computer use. The court upheld his conviction and sentence.

Expert evidence in Alba's case showed that the Web addresses obtained by federal agents included page numbers that allowed the agents to determine what someone read online, Crowley said.

The ruling "further erodes our privacy," the attorney said. "The great political marketplace of ideas is the Internet, and the government has unbridled access to it."

Government Deftly Wielding Secrecy To Elude Scrutiny Of NSA Extra-Legal Warrantless Surveillance Program (CATCH ALL)

The program is secret, so the plaintiffs were unable to prove they had been spied upon.

And in the next NSA extra-legal surveillance cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals, the government will be deploying the "State Secrets" privilege to bar discovery of relevant details of the program.

A divided federal appeals court yesterday dismissed a case challenging the National Security Agency's program to wiretap without warrants the international communications of some Americans, reversing a trial judge's order that the program be shut down.

The majority in a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled on a narrow ground, saying the plaintiffs, including lawyers and journalists, could not show injury direct and concrete enough to allow them to have standing to sue.

Because it may be impossible for any plaintiff to demonstrate injury from the highly classified wiretapping program, the effect of the ruling was to insulate it from judicial scrutiny. Thus, the program's secrecy is proving to be its best legal protection.

The majority did not rule on the merits of the case, though the appeals court judge who wrote the lead opinion, Judge Alice M. Batchelder, said the case had provoked "a cascade of serious questions." She listed five, including whether the program violated a 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, along with the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. ...

A number of other challenges to the program have been consolidated before a federal judge in San Francisco, and the federal appeals court there, the Ninth Circuit, will hear an appeal from one of the judge's preliminary rulings next month.

Some of the plaintiffs in that case contend that they have been personally injured by the program, which if proved could give them standing to sue, even under yesterday's ruling. Those plaintiffs, an Islamic charity and two of its lawyers, say they have seen a classified document confirming that their communications were actually intercepted. ...

The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We are deeply disappointed," the group's legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, said in a statement, "by today's decision that insulates the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance activities from judicial review and deprives Americans of any ability to challenge the illegal surveillance of their telephone calls and e-mails."

Mr. Shapiro said the A.C.L.U. was weighing its options, including the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court.

Yesterday's action in the 6th Circuit means that the principal remaining legal challenge to the NSA surveillance program is a group of cases pending before a U.S. District Court judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California. The primary issue before that appeals court, differing somewhat from that in the Michigan case, is whether the administration may claim that a privilege covering state secrets precludes the litigation.

Hearts and Minds

After more than five years of increasingly intense warfare, the conflict in Afghanistan reached a grim milestone in the first half of this year: U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies.

The upsurge in deaths at the hands of Western forces has been driven by Taliban tactics as well as by actions of the American military and its allies.

But the growing toll is causing widespread disillusionment among the Afghan people, eroding support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and exacerbating political rifts among NATO allies about the nature and goals of the mission in Afghanistan.

More than 500 Afghan civilians have been reported killed this year, and the rate has dramatically increased in the last month.

In some instances, it was difficult to determine whether the dead were combatants or noncombatants. But in many other cases, there was no doubt that the person killed was a bystander to war. ...

By late June, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, working with local rights groups, had counted 314 civilian deaths at the hands of Western-led forces and 279 people killed by the Taliban and other militants. But that figure did not include at least 45 civilian deaths reported by local officials last weekend in Helmand province's Gereshk district.

Separate counts by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Associated Press differed slightly, but also indicated that more civilians were killed by Western troops than by militants during the first half of 2007.

On June 23, in response to the deaths of more than 100 noncombatants in a single week that were blamed on Western artillery or airstrikes in southern Afghanistan, President Karzai unleashed an angry call for caution by U.S. and NATO forces.

"Afghan life is not cheap, and it should not be treated as such," the Afghan president told reporters in Kabul.

Aides said Karzai believed that his language, the sharpest to date on the subject, was the only way to get the attention of Western policymakers after repeated appeals had gone unanswered.

Neither NATO nor U.S. forces keep a tally of civilian deaths, but Thomas said the military did not dispute the figures cited by Karzai. All sides, however, acknowledge that counting casualties is an inexact science.

Because Taliban fighters do not wear military uniforms, they can be as difficult to identify in death as in life. Much of the fighting takes place in remote, rugged areas that are difficult for independent investigators to reach.

Iraqi Insurgent Group Was Behind 9/11 Attacks, Bush Announces

Bush is getting really desperate now.

President Bush equated the war in Iraq on Wednesday with the U.S. war for independence. Like those revolutionaries who "dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty," Bush said, American soldiers were also fighting "a new and unprecedented war" to protect U.S. freedom.

In a reprise of speeches he delivered throughout the 2006 congressional campaign, the president said the threat that emerged on Sept. 11, 2001, remained today and "a major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day."

Bush knows goddamn good and well that "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is the adopted name of an Iraqi insurgent group (albeit with foreign fighters) and is not Osama Bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" (9/11), yet he is intentionally conflating the two for domestic propaganda purposes.

A security expert I know in Washington puts it this way: "If a group of Iraq insurgents had taken the name "The Boy Scouts of America" instead of "Al Qaeda in Iraq", I doubt that the president would be claiming that the Boy Scouts of America were behind attacks on our soldiers over there."

It wouldn't be as easy to blame them for 9/11, either.

Also, more fearmongering from the Crim-in Chief:

In an Independence Day address before members of the National Guard and their families, the president again painted a dire portrait of the consequences of pulling out of Iraq, asserting as he has before that "terrorists and extremists" would try to strike inside the United States.

"If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms. They would follow us here, home," Bush told a crowd of about 1,000 gathered at a West Virginia Air National Guard maintenance hangar.

Bush's presidency has always relied upon the ignorance of the American people. It has been a good bet so far.

But as when someone relies too much upon any type of artifice, Bush has lost the perspective necessary to avoid chronically pandering to the lowest common denominator.

The Coalition of the Billing

There is talk in Washington that over 1000 contractors have been killed to date in Iraq. The number becomes understandable when you discover the extent of the use of contractors in that beleaguered nation.

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.

"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing." ...

But there are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.

Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.

"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene." ...

Adding an element of potential confusion, no single agency keeps track of the number or location of contractors.

In response to demands from Congress, the U.S. Central Command began a census last year of the number of contractors working on U.S. and Iraqi bases to determine how much food, water and shelter was needed.

That census, provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows about 130,000 contractors and subcontractors of different nationalities working at U.S. and Iraqi military bases.

However, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the census did not include other government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department