Another Guardian piece — this one focused on the Pashtun people — all 40 million of them — who inhabit a sweeping crescent of the earth widely overlapping a good deal of Afghanistan’s borders, including that with Pakistan.

The piece also focuses on Obama’s new envoy to the area, Richard Holbrooke (whom I’ve chatted with a few times, in old Yugoslavia and New York).  I don’t yet understand what he’s been sent to accomplish (nor it seems does the author of the Guardian piece, although he does his best to explain).

If one knew what the Americans (led by Gates and Mullen at the Pentagon) “war aims” were, one might begin to get a handle.  But no one ever, ever discusses the point.  Instead we get (from the current piece) the likes of this:

QUOTE

“The immediate problem is to stop the bleeding. The 30,000 troops is a tourniquet … [but] that is all we have,” he said. “If Obama is a two-term president then by the end of his time in office there may only be marine embassy guards in Iraq. But there will still be tens of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan.”  END QUOTE

Okay, I guess. We gonna be there til the cows come home. That’s apparently been decided by the Decider whoever that might be.

But why we gonna be there?  Spilling a lot of words, nobody can quite say:

QUOTE

Call it the central front of the global “war on terror”, the fulcrum of the “arc of crisis”, “Pashtunistan” or simply, in the most recent neologism, “AfPak”, no one doubts that this is the biggest foreign policy headache for Obama’s new team.  END QUOTE

“No one doubts.”  Nobody knows — but neither does anybody doubts.

QUOTE

“The situation there grows more perilous every day,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the American joint chiefs of staff, told journalists earlier this month. Holbrooke reaches for the ultimate comparison: “It’s tougher than Iraq.”

First, there is the local situation. Since launching an offensive in 2006 the shifting alliance of insurgents which make up the Taliban in Afghanistan have established control — or at least denied government authority — over a large part of southern and eastern Afghanistan. British foreign secretary David Miliband last week spoke of a “stalemate” — something senior generals and security officials have known for some time.  END QUOTE

Kudos for the candidness to note, in print, that the Taliban barely exists as an organization worthy of a name.  Rather, a “shifting alliance of insurgents.”

So when the Pentagon defeats the Taliban … It shifts.  Never goes away.  But never quite exists.

QUOTE

Local Afghan forces are still far from able to take on the insurgents without assistance from the 73,000 Nato troops now in country.  The government is corrupt and ineffective. Opium production has exploded. Across the border in Pakistan, despite continuing military operations, authorities seem unable to push the Islamic militants on to the defensive. And somewhere in the mess is al-Qaida, though few can say exactly where.  END QUOTE

Ah, the Pentagon’s other enemy.  Where are they?  Nobody knows.  Not clear it quite seem to exist either.   Al Qaeda was basically Osama Bin Laden’s $250 million dollars.  And that’s gone.  Today …

The author goes on to describe the regional problem:  old tensions between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But doesn’t say a word about what Holbrooke or the Pentagon aim to do about them.

Then circles back to note the global problem:  The Pashtun — who have barely made it into the industrial age — as font of global islamic terrorism.  But again, the author provides no sentences describing specific diplomatic and/or military aims.

Then of all things we have Steve Cohen, Likud Lobbyist, who helped sell the IRaq war and is now (our author suggests) working for Obama, waxing:

QUOTE

White House strategists believe it will hold up much better than the conflict in Iraq.

“The polling has been very supportive. Iraq was a phony war but al-Qaida really is in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Cohen.  That makes the job of persuading Americans that the war needs to be fought much easier.

It is not hard to point out the genuine threats of a region where there are thousands of Islamic militants, nuclear weapons and where the 9/11 plot was hatched.

“The main task will be to persuade the allies, especially the Europeans,” said Cohen.

END QUOTE

!?!?!  He was central to helping Wolfowitz and Feith sell the Iraq war — but now, selling a new one, says the Iraq war was phony.  Slays me.

QUOTE

“We have certainly pulled back from the aims of a nice, happy, Scandinavian-style democracy,’ said Steve Cohen, at the Brookings Institution policy research centre, Washington.

The priority now is stabilisation. “There is a recognition that before… nation building, you have to clear the ground,” said Seth Jones, of the US-based Rand Corporation thinktank.

END QUOTE

An implication that we are fighting something like a war, and intend doing so beyond the eight years that Obama may be in office, to clear the ground for democracy in Afghanistan ?!?  Something that has never been and for which the sociological and demographic substratum likely never will?

There is nothing else in the entire piece to suggest an aim for American involvement.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so emtpy and insane. The rationale for Vietnam was well and deeply discussed and thought out in comparison.  There is almost nothing in the public discourse to justify our presence over there, where history shouts no one has ever been able to Win anything.

This Guardian piece suggests that Obama will have to go it alone with his escalation in Pakghanistan as the NATO allies say Goodbye to all that.

But all five contributors are Military Industrial Complex minions.

I confess myself mystified as to why Obama/Clinton have appointed him special envoy to Pakghanistan.  George Mitchell for Israel makes sense, in that diplomacy is the only non-catastrophic solution of the Israel problem.  But farther east it seems clear that the Pentagon intends to fight a big war and that Obama (and McCain) said okay many months ago.

Gibbs tried to dodge her, then, rather ridiculously, cited 9/11, saying that people like the people who attacked us back then reside in Afghanistan.

This might as well be Bush-Cheney or McCain. The Pentagon is running foreign policy.

There is nothing to win over there.  Helen is right.  Obama wrong to along.

– the coming Surge in Afghanistan is indeed a policy Obama is rubber-stamping rather than leading.

– Obama will withdraw support from the Afghan leader more or less appointed by the Likud Lobby leadership under early Bush-Cheney, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun and one-time CIA affiliate.