There is no divine law that says that if one of our wars is going poorly the other must be going well. But there is a capacity beyond which the public cannot absorb any more bad news just as the press has a capacity beyond which it cannot carry any more repetitively horrifying stories; the narrative of both wars going badly might be too much for the system to handle. In the absence of news whatever public discourse there is on the subject gets filled by conjecture and politically motivated yammering, which has absolutely nothing to do with whatever the hell is actually happening on the other side of the world.
In that spirit, let’s take a quick look at some actual news, depressing though it is. In the last month there have been two highly publicized attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan. Whether these attacks are the responsibility of the Taliban or of other largely unrelated forces is unclear. The tenor of the attacks was much different than previous encounters though. Back in July, a force of two hundred men attacked a freshly set up government outpost near the Pakistani border. Nine Americans were killed and though the initial attack was repulsed the outpost was later abandoned.
Then yesterday word came of another large scale attack, this time right outside Kabul. Ten French paratroopers were killed and the article describes a “sense of siege around the capital”. This was not a fleeting attack by small band of armed men out in the boonies; this was a coordinated military assault, employing regular military tactics in conjunction with suicide bombers. Kabul, the center of the international presence and the Green Zone of Afghanistan now apparently feels itself under siege.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Iran, things aren’t going particularly well either. American casualties have dropped considerably, but that seems to have more to do with a lowering of American troop levels and the ceding of various areas to local strongmen who are only as loyal to the central government as their last paycheck. Juan Cole had a link this morning to a story in Abu Dhabi’s new English language daily The Nation about the hilariously named Sons of Iraq (SOI). Essentially these are armed militias being paid by us not to do anything:
Col White and other commanders said they believed if the Iraqi government disbanded the SOIs, the men would refuse to give up their weapons and would continue to take orders from the sheikhs who employed them.
Cole’s headline this morning was about local police in Diyala shooting it out with men who may or may not have been from the central government and may or may not have had the support of American forces. Iraq is, demonstrably, riven daily with conflicting authorities.
There is the Green Zone government which nominally works with the United States, but the two are unable to coordinate sufficiently to keep cousins of the Prime Minister from getting killed by American bullets. There is the (for the moment) non-governmental Shiite movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr, which promised to turn its militia into a social works organization (so long as the US adheres to the withdrawal timetable) in order to compete in elections. However, as Professor Cole pointed out a couple weeks ago:
Whenever they are held the next provincial and parliamentary elections could give the Sadrists a lot of power. In a society where so many men have a gun, the difference between a militia and such an organization anyway isn’t clear, except they’re saying they won’t usually carry around the guns in public. They could get them out at any time, though.
Then there is the (increasingly separate) issue of the Kurdish north. Yesterday The New York Times actually used the term “Powder Keg” to describe the situation in Kirkuk. The Kurds are in the enviable position of having military control over the north of the country and increasingly seem less and less interested in what goes on in the rest of Iraq. The oil sharing law and the scheduling of new parliamentary elections appear to have been held up by the Kurdish bloc in parliament; the Kurdish MPs apparently see little reason to compromise with their countrymen to the south. Getting those two laws passed, by the way, was an explicit goal of the American troop escalation last year.
The above words are little more than newspaper clippings and quotes, but the grim picture they paint is generally accurate and the conclusion is inescapable. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is progressing towards anything that could reasonably be called stability. Things are getting worse in both places, anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
