To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report "America at War" by Peter Katel, July 23, 2010
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From the very beginning of the post-Sept. 11 wartime period, U.S. officials were warning that the conflicts wouldn't end with the equivalent of the definitive enemy surrenders that halted World War II.
Instead, the key sign would be the elimination of terrorist sanctuaries, where Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations can plan, train and coordinate. Today, the key sanctuary is the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. That zone is the “locus of the heartland of Al Qaeda,” Defense Undersecretary for Policy Flournoy told the House Armed Services Committee in May. [Footnote 30]
And Al Qaeda in some ways is more dangerous today, said Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a government agency established in 2004 that reports to the president. He said the organization showed its capabilities in the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant to the United States, who pleaded guilty in February to terrorism charges centered on a plan to explode a bomb in the New York subway system.[Footnote 31] “There has been a diversification of the threat and a move towards simpler, smaller efforts to attack the United States,” Leiter said, “which don't have quite the same level of threat in terms of the damage it might cause, but in the multiplicity of the threats I think it is more challenging today.”[Footnote 32]
But with half its leaders killed, “Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan is weaker today than it has been since 2001,” Leiter told a conference at the Aspen Institute think tank in Colorado. “Now, weaker doesn't mean harmless … It is still a meaningful and dangerous force.”[Footnote 33]
Opponents of the Afghan war say conditions in the jihadist heartland show the failure of the effort to destroy Al Qaeda in war, as opposed to more precisely targeted law-enforcement and military operations. “We ourselves, for domestic political reasons, make things worse and not better by turning these mass murderers into warriors,” says Andrews of Win Without War. “Framing this as a war and elevating them to warriors fighting for a cause, we strengthen them. We need to revisit whether this approach makes sense — the facts show very clearly that it doesn't.”
A smarter, more effective response to the Sept. 11 attacks would have been to “use tools that actually work — surgical operations where you go after these guys,” Andrews says. “That does not mean invading and having a massive military footprint in a country.”
But a senior U.S. security official with long experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan argues that the long military campaign has weakened the United States' enemies. “The risk of a 9/11-type event has clearly gone down,” the official says, speaking on condition he not be named. “They've not been able to pull off something like that. The pressure we've put on their networks, and the leadership targeting, is important.” To be sure, he acknowledges, much of that pressure and targeting is taking place in Pakistan, where U.S. troops are not waging war.
Nevertheless, he says, “What takes Afghanistan from an important national interest to a vital national interest is that, if we did not surge in Afghanistan, you would see the Pakistanis cutting a lot more deals” with jihadists. “The resources we are investing in Afghanistan have helped us make the case to them that we are doing our part.”
But other experts argue that the war — along with drone strikes on Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan — is hurting more than it's helping. “The presence and operations of the U.S. in the theater … because they are misperceived in terms of their nature and purpose, has continued to be a stimulus to radicalism including radicalism that takes the form of terrorism,” Paul Pillar, a former career CIA specialist in the region, said in June at a Washington conference held by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).[Footnote 34]
The U.S. military deployment has also prompted non-radicals to join the fight against the Americans and their allies, said Pillar, now the graduate studies director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies in Washington “This has been reflected … in the continued taking up of arms by many Afghans who have no sympathy whatsoever for the extreme political and social views of the Taliban but see themselves as waging an anti-occupation struggle.”[Footnote 35]
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The Issues:
* Can the United States meet the troop drawdown start date in Afghanistan?
* Should immediate negotiations with the Taliban be the top U.S. priority?
* Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan making U.S. enemies weaker?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "America at War" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
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Footnotes
[30] ”House Armed Services Committee Holds Hearing on Developments in Afghanistan,” CQ Congressional Transcripts, May 5, 2010.
[31] A.G. Sulzberger and William K. Rashbaum, “Guilty Plea Made in Plot to Bomb New York Subway,” The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2010.
[32] “Terror Threat From Abroad,” Aspen Institute, C-SPAN, June 30, 2010 (Web video).
[33] Ibid.
[34] “Beyond Afghanistan: America's Enduring Interests in Central and South Asia,” Center for a New American Security, June 10, 2010, transcript.
[35] Ibid.
Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan making U.S. enemies weaker?
Former child soldier released from Gitmo
By John Felton, CQ Global Researcher Author
August 25, 2009
The U.S. military has released and returned to Afghanistan one of two young Muslim men who may have been juveniles when they were imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba. Mohammad Jawad, who reportedly was only 16 or 17 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in December 2002, arrived back in Afghanistan on August 24. Just one day later, he told Reuters news service that he had been tortured and humiliated during the nearly seven years he spent at Guantánamo. "There was a lot of oppression when I was in Guantánamo and these inhumane actions were not for just one day, one week or one month," Reuters quoted him as saying at his family home south of Kabul.
Jawad's case was one of the most troublesome for the Pentagon of all the hundreds of men who have been held at Guantánamo since early 2002. For starters, he probably was under-age when he was captured—a status that led Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations to demand that he be considered a child soldier and either be released or transferred to a civilian court. Human rights groups also called for special consideration for Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen who reportedly was only 15 when captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo.
Both the Jawad and Khadr cases were featured in the July 2008 issue of CQ Global Researcher on the role of child soldiers in modern combat.
There were also many questions about the evidence backing up the charge against Jawad: that he threw a grenade into a vehicle carrying two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter. Jawad allegedly confessed to Afghan police that he threw the grenade, which wounded the soldiers. Afghan authorities turned him over to the U.S. military, which sent him to Guantánamo early in 2003.
Jawad's lawyers at Guantánamo said the confession had been extracted as the result of torture. On Oct. 28, 2008, a U.S. military judge, Col. Stephen R. Henley, agreed with the lawyers and ordered Jawad's Dec. 12, 2002 confession suppressed on the grounds that it had been elicited by torture: "The Military Commission concludes that the Accused’s statements to the Afghan authorities were obtained by physical intimidation and threats of death which, under the circumstances, constitute torture..." under the rules of evidence for the military commissions.
Jawad's case then moved to a U.S. District Court in Washington, where Judge
Ellen Segal Huvelle on July 16 said the government had "no evidence" against him. The government dropped its charges against Jawad on July 31, and nearly four weeks later put him on a plane to Afghanistan.
Omar Khadr remains at Guantánamo, partly because the Canadian government does not appear to want him back. A Canadian federal appeals court on August 15 ordered the government to seek Khadr's repatriation, but a government spokeswoman said later that the ruling would be appealed because Khadr had been accused of serious crimes, including killing a U.S. soldier.
Growing Number of Americans Oppose Afghan War
By Thomas J. Billitteri, Aug. 20, 2009
As Afghans went to the polls today amid Taliban violence aimed at disrupting the country’s presidential election, a new survey showed that many Americans — particularly members of President Barack Obama’s own Democratic Party — are turning against the war in Afghanistan.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 51 percent of American adults say the war isn’t worth fighting, up six percentage points in a month and 10 points since March. Among Democrats, 70 percent say the war hasn’t been worth the cost, while the same percentage of Republicans says the war is worth fighting.
The poll results have to be bad news for the Obama administration and military commanders, who see the Afghanistan conflict as crucial to defeating the Taliban, preventing al Qaeda from re-establishing itself in Afghanistan and thwarting further destabilization in neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan, where Islamist extremists have sown havoc from their mountain redoubts near the Afghan border.
As I noted in our August 7 report, “Afghanistan Dilemma,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other officials are well aware of public impatience with the war, and they have said they have perhaps a year to show progress in bringing the Taliban to heel and restoring a semblance of order to the country. But the public’s weariness with the war, which began nearly eight years ago in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, has surfaced far sooner than they must have hoped. It’s been only five months since Obama announced a new strategy for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and even less time since Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a respected counterinsurgency expert, took over as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country.
No doubt the surge of Taliban carnage and rising American casualties leading up to this week’s elections have turned more and more Americans against the war. The opinion poll was conducted late last week and early this week as news of car bombings and other violence hit TV screens and the Internet. What’s more, many Democrats believe the Obama administration should be focusing its attention and budget on domestic issues like health care and global warming, and they fear a long war in Afghanistan will drain both money from the federal budget and political capital from the Democratic Party.
Military officials say the stakes in Afghanistan are enormously high, especially because a defeat there would, they say, embolden extremists in Pakistan and possibly allow them to get their hands on the country’s nuclear arsenal. But whether the American public—and Congress—will sustain support for the Afghan war remains an open, and important, question.
----Thomas J. Billitteri
Staff Writer
CQ Researcher
To view the"Afghanistan Dilemma" report, login to CQ Researcher Online [subscription required], or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Excerpt from the "Afghanistan Dilemma" report
By Thomas J. Billitteri, August 7, 2009
On the outskirts of Now Zad, a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan's violent Helmand Province, the past, 
present and future of the war in Afghanistan came together this summer.
The past: After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Now Zad and its surrounding poppy fields and stout compounds were largely tranquil, thanks in part to the clinics and wells that Western money helped to build in the area. But three years ago, when the war in Iraq intensified and the Bush administration shifted attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, insurgents moved in, driving out most of Now Zad's 35,000 residents and foreign aid workers.
The present: This summer U.S. Marines engaged in withering firefights with Taliban militants dug in on the northern fringes of the town and in nearby fields and orchards.
The future: The situation in Now Zad and the surrounding war-torn region of southern Afghanistan is a microcosm of what confronts the Obama administration as it tries to smash the Taliban, defang al Qaeda and stabilize governance in Afghanistan. "In many ways," wrote an Associated Press reporter following the fighting, Now Zad "symbolizes what went wrong in Afghanistan and the enormous challenges facing the United States."
Nearly eight years after U.S.-led forces first entered Afghanistan to pursue al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the country remains in chaos, and President Barack Obama faces what many consider his biggest foreign-policy challenge: bringing stability and security to Afghanistan and denying Islamist militants a permanent foothold there and in neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan.
The challenge is heightened by the war's growing casualty figures. July was the deadliest month in Afghanistan for U.S. soldiers since the 2001 invasion began, with 43 killed. Twenty-two British troops also died last month, including eight in a 24-hour period. In nearly eight years of war in Afghanistan, 767 U.S. troops have died there, along with 520 coalition forces, according to the Web site iCasualties.org. Thousands of Afghan civilians also have died.
The Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict –"Af-Pak" in diplomatic parlance – poses a witch's brew of challenges: fanatical Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, rampant corruption within Afghanistan's homegrown police force and other institutions, not enough Afghan National Army forces to help with the fighting and a multibillion-dollar opium economy that supplies revenue to the insurgents.
But those problems pale in comparison with what foreign-policy experts call the ultimate nightmare: Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into the hands of jihadists and terrorists, a scenario that has become more credible this summer as suicide bombers and Taliban fighters have stepped up attacks in Pakistani cities and rural areas, using Pakistan's lawless western border region as a sanctuary.
"The fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the question of the security of those weapons presses very hard on the minds of American defense planners and on the mind of the president," says Bruce Riedel, who led a 60-day strategic policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration. "If you didn't have that angle," adds Riedel, who has since returned to his post as a Brookings Institution senior fellow, "I think this would all be notched down one level of concern."
Pakistan is important to the Afghan conflict for reasons that go beyond its nuclear arsenal. Pakistan has been a breeding ground for much of the radical ideology that has taken root in Afghanistan. A failure of governance in Afghanistan would leave a void that Islamist militants on either side of the border could wind up filling, further destabilizing the entire region.
In March Obama announced what he called a "comprehensive, new strategy" for Afghanistan and Pakistan that rests on a "clear and focused goal" for the region: "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future."
Key to the strategy is winning over the local Afghan population by protecting it from insurgent violence and improving governance, security and economic development.
The effort includes new troop deployments – a total of 21,000 additional U.S. soldiers to fight the insurgency in Afghanistan and train Afghan security forces, plus other strategic resources. By year's end, U.S. troop levels are expected to reach about 68,000. NATO countries and other allies currently are supplying another 32,000 or so, though many are engaged in development and relief work but not offensive combat operations.
An immediate goal is to heighten security in Afghanistan in the run-up to a high-profile presidential election on Aug. 20. None of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's main challengers are expected to beat him flat out, The Washington Post noted, but some observers said other candidates could "do well enough as a group to force a second round of polling, partly because of recent blunders by Karzai and partly because many Afghans are looking for alternative leadership at a time of sustained insurgent violence, economic stagnation and political drift."
Observers say Obama's approach to the Af-Pak conflict represents a middle path between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency – protecting civilians, relying on them for information on the enemy and providing aid to build up a country's social and physical infrastructure and democratic institutions.
Among the most notable features of the new approach is a vow among military officials – beginning with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly appointed commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan – to avoid civilian casualties. McChrystal pledged to follow a "holistic" approach in which protecting civilians takes precedence over killing militants.
"I expect stiff fighting ahead," McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing. But "the measure of effectiveness will not be the number of enemy killed," he added, "it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence."
The United Nations said that 1,013 civilians died in the first six months of 2009, up from 818 during the same period last year. The U.N. said 310 deaths were attributed to pro-government forces, with about two-thirds caused by U.S. air strikes.
As part of his strategy, Obama called for a "dramatic" increase in the number of agricultural specialists, educators, engineers and lawyers dispatched to "help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs." He also supports economic-development aid to Pakistan, including legislation to provide $1.5 billion annually over the next five years. But Obama's approach on Pakistan also reflects long-held Western concerns that the Pakistani government has been at best negligent – and perhaps downright obstructionist – in bringing Taliban and other Islamist extremists to heel. Pakistan, whose situation is complicated by longstanding tensions with nearby India, will get no free pass in exchange for the aid, Obama vowed. "We will not, and cannot, provide a blank check," he said, because Pakistan had shown "years of mixed results" in rooting out terrorism.
As Obama goes after the insurgency, his Af-Pak policy is under the microscope here at home.
Some have demanded that the administration describe its plans for ending military operations in Afghanistan. A measure proposed by Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., requiring a report from the Obama administration by the end of the year on its exit strategy, drew significant support from Democrats but was defeated in the House this summer amid heavy Republican opposition.
And some critics question the validity of Obama's rationale for the fighting in Afghanistan, particularly the assumption that if the Taliban were victorious they would invite al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan and use it as a base for its global jihad. John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, contends that al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan as a base. The 2001 terrorist attacks were orchestrated mostly from Hamburg, Germany, he points out.
What's more, he argues, "distinct tensions" exist between al Qaeda and the Taliban. Even if the Taliban were to prevail in Afghanistan, he says, "they would not particularly want al Qaeda back." Nor, he says, is it clear that al Qaeda would again view Afghanistan as a safe haven.
But administration officials disagree. The Taliban are "the frontrunners for al Qaeda," said Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. "If they succeed in Afghanistan, without any shadow of a doubt al Qaeda would move back into Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and pursue its objectives against the United States even more aggressively."
The Issues:
* Is the Obama administration pursuing the right course in Afghanistan?
* Are troop levels in Afghanistan adequate?
* Should the United States negotiate with the Taliban?
To view the entire report, login to CQ Researcher Online [subscription required], or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Afghanistan Dilemma
Is President Obama pursuing the right course?
By Thomas J. Billitteri, August 7, 2009
Nearly eight years ago, U.S. forces first entered Afghanistan to pursue the al Qaeda terrorists who plotted the Sept. 11 terror attacks. American troops are still there today, along with thousands of NATO forces. 
Under a new strategy crafted by the Obama administration, military leaders are trying to deny terrorists a permanent foothold in the impoverished Central Asian country and in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan, whose western border region has become a sanctuary for Taliban and al Qaeda forces. The Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict — “Af-Pak” in diplomatic parlance — poses huge challenges ranging from rampant corruption within Afghanistan's police forces to a multibillion-dollar opium economy that funds the insurgency. But those problems pale in comparison with the ultimate nightmare scenario: Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, which foreign-policy experts say has become a real possibility.
The Issues:
* Is the Obama administration pursuing the right course in Afghanistan?
* Are troop levels in Afghanistan adequate?
* Should the United States negotiate with the Taliban?
To view the entire report, login to CQ Researcher Online [subscription required], or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
