Scorched Earth & Fake Negotiations

Where in the world is 
Mullah Mansour?

Leveling entire villages to deny them to the enemy sounds like something out of the Middle Ages. And the idea that a clever rogue could dupe a powerful government into handing him sacks of treasure is a plot straight out of a 16th Century baroque adventure novel. But in fact, these are actual stories coming out of Afghanistan this week.

For several months, the U.S. and Afghanistan have been engaged in secret talks with Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the Taliban’s highest ranking commanders.

Or so they believed. It turns out that the man with whom they were engaged in face-to-face negotiations over a period of months was just an imposter who was busy extracting cash from his U.S. and Afghan counterparts in turn for continued negotiations and concessions.

Nobody’s sure who he is – a Taliban double-agent, a clever con man, or an operative from the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency). The only thing certain is who he isn’t: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.

While this may sound a bit humorous on the surface, it also raises a very serious question. If U.S. intelligence can’t positively identify someone with whom their government is engaged in face-to-face negotiations, how on Earth are they capable of making positive identification of other Taliban leaders who they are targeting for assassination? It makes the term “suspected militants” a little, well, suspect. Who are we really killing with our drone-launched Hellfires, anyway?

Another issue that’s recently emerged in the on-going conflict is the scorched-earth policy that’s being conducted around Kandahar, where Coalition forces are systematically destroying almost all vacant buildings to eliminate hiding places for their opponents, and to avoid the possibility of encountering booby traps.

In Article 23 of the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare, it is especially forbidden “to destroy or seize the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.”

Are the hundreds of homes destroyed since these operations began in September (along with orchards, outbuildings, walls and fences) truly critical to the outcome of the war, to the point that their destruction becomes an imperative demand of necessity?

Or are Coalition forces instead simply taking an easy (and illegal) way out to deprive their opponents of shelter and spare themselves the requirement to otherwise secure these buildings?

Villagers can be compensated, but only if their whereabouts are known and they have consented to the destruction. But according to the district governor, in the case of the village of Khosrow, where all 40 homes were leveled by a massive U.S. missile barrage: 

“We destroyed them without agreement because it was hard to find the people… and not just Khosrow, but many villages... we had to destroy them to make them safe.”

Afghan Sovereignty vs. U.S. Interests

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Bret Stephens claims that allowing the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan government “risks turning Afghanistan into another Vietnam.” 

But it is worth noting that 3 decades after the US withdrawal from that Asian state, the country is unified, secure, enjoying 20+ years of strong economic growth, becoming a popular tourist destination, and is even a port of call for US warships operating in the area.

Stephens still assesses that the war in Afghanistan is imminently winnable, but it seems he’s neglected to read the recent headlines in his own paper, which show that as NATO forces shift their attentions to the South, the Taliban are quietly taking over provinces in the North. A much-vaunted offensive earlier against the small town of Marjah came to naught, so it’s hard to be optimistic about the current push to control Kandahar.

More disturbing than Mr. Stephens apparent naiveté regarding the conditions on the ground is the real basis for his opposition to negotiations;

What happens in the event that Mr. Karzai is prepared to accept terms unacceptable to the U.S., such as sharing power with Mullah Omar? Ultimately, we are in Afghanistan to defend core U.S. interests, not the whims of its capricious president. 

Ahh, yes, Mr. Stephens. When a puppet government fails to dance to the tune of its foreign master, what’s a beleaguered superpower to do? And what are these “core interests” that we are defending ? The survival of our Nation is hardly at stake; neither is our economic growth, or our national culture. And the argument that Afghanistan represents a security risk because it ostensibly trained the 9-11 terrorists is as trite now as it was a decade ago – the state where those hijackers obtained the training they needed to carry out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon wasn’t Afghanistan – it was Florida.

Stephens believes the only way to proceed is to halt negotiations and deliver “a series of decisive military blows” that would ostensibly force the Taliban to end the war on U.S. terms. But why should the terms be set by America? Isn’t it an “International Security Assistance Force” that’s opposing the Talibs? Shouldn’t the terms be theirs? No and no. Any negotiations to end the war should take place between the primary actors; the current Afghan government and their Taliban opponents.

The U.S. and other international actors may attempt to shape those negotiations through political pressure on the Afghan government and through military pressure on the Taliban, but in the final analysis, any decision reached by those two parties, however distasteful it may be to the U.S. and its ISAF allies must be respected – or another blow against national sovereignty will have been resoundingly struck.

Book Burning – Bad If A Church Does It, But OK for the US Government?

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon bought up nearly every copy of “Operation Dark Heart” from St. Martin’s Press, and then destroyed all the books “to protect secrets.” (The fact is noted in 3 paragraphs at the bottom of an unrelated post regarding the latest Afghan War casualties.) 

While a redacted edition is available in hardcover and in a Kindle edition proponents of free speech must certainly hope that one of the 100 uncensored copies which escaped the clutches of government censors and are now being sold for upwards of $2000 on the Internet, will soon be released in a full-text file by WikiLeaks or a similar organization. (One copy is owned by the NY Times, which originally published the "teaser" pages shown here.) 

And who paid for this egregious act of censorship? The American taxpayer, of course, to the tune of about $50,000 dollars. As Gabriel Schoenfeld remarked in a more detailed accounting by the Times, “There’s smart secrecy and stupid secrecy, and this whole episode sounds like stupid secrecy.” That's putting it mildly, Mr. Schoenfeld.