American Footprints » Obama Admin

Alaa Explains Next Choices for Egypt Revolution

nadezhda — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:00:03 +0000

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, senior producer for Democracy Now interviews the youth activist and blogger, Alaa Abd El Fattah, in Tahrir Square on where the revolution stands now (Day 15, Feb 9). Alaa describes the contributions of the various groups driving the revolution, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and the challenges of making decisions among a disparate collection of protesting groups. He explains the complex options for pushing the revolution forward, such as whether to try to begin to replace regime structures from the ground up, and the entrance of the labor movement as a new factor. Especially noteworthy is that he treats seriously the pros-and-cons of both a go-slow approach to amending the constitution and the more radical option of rejecting the current constitution as illegitimate.

I highly recommend this ten-minute interview. Both optimistic and realistic, the interview shows how tricky the coming steps will be, seen both from Tahrir Square and from the White House or Foggy Bottom.

Even if the Egyptian government’s response to the expanding protests becomes more conciliatory, the central issue is that those supporting the protests cannot trust the regime leaders’ promises to reform themselves. Hence the significance of the readout of Biden’s phone call with Suleiman: the notion of “irreversible” as part of what constitutes “meaningful” change. Echoing Obama’s earlier statement that Egypt “can’t go back”, this was a critical step in the White House’s evolving public position. At least for the moment, this puts Obama on the same page as the protesters in assessing whether Suleiman’s actions reach the test Gibbs defined in Wednesday’s briefing: that the govenment meet a “minimum threshold” of change acceptable to the Egyptian public.

Transcript of the interview is at the Democracy Now site.

Aluf Benn and Reality

Brian Ulrich — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:05:49 +0000

Aluf Benn must be living in an alternate universe:

“Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was perceived in Israel as a shining victory. Rocket fire from Gaza was brought to a halt almost completely. The Israel Defense Forces emerged from its failure during the Second Lebanon War and deployed ground forces with few casualties. ‘The world’ let the operation continue and did not impose a cease-fire. A wonderful war.

“Ten months later, it seems the victory was a Pyrrhic one. Israel did not realize that the rules have changed with Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president. Prime minister Ehud Olmert timed Cast Lead to take place during the twilight period between the outgoing and incoming U.S. administrations, and rightly assumed that the incumbent, George W. Bush, would fully back Israel. However, in contrast to the Lebanon war of 2006, which ended with a cease-fire, the Gaza campaign continues being fought – in the diplomatic arena and in public opinion – and Israel must cope with its consequences in a less-friendly Obama era.”

The context for this is the Goldstone Report, which Benn argues Obama is using, in some nebulous fashion, to punish Israel. Meanwhile, in the reality I inhabit, the U.S. worked to block the report, and, about the same time, withdrew from the Anatolian Eagle military exercises after Turkey excluded Israel. Rhetoric might have changed slightly, but the Obama administration has shown no teeth of any kind toward the Netanyahu government and Israel’s settlement policy, which is the real problem.

(Crossposted to my blog)

No SOFA Referendum?

motown67 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:43:54 +0000

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 5, 2009 that there might not be a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Iraq and the United States. The SOFA is actually two documents that set the future relations between the two countries. When it was originally debated in Iraq’s parliament, the Iraqi Accordance Front successfully pushed through a referendum in a separate, non-binding, Political Reform Document. Originally the balloting was scheduled for July 2009, but neither the cabinet nor the legislature came up with a bill for the election. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki then said he wanted the referendum to occur the same time as the January 2010 parliamentary vote. Now, Iraqi politicians talking to the Wall Street Journal have said that there is no drive to hold the referendum in January either. Parliamentarian Saleh al-Mutlaq worried that there may be a security vacuum if the U.S. is forced to leave early if the SOFA is voted down by the Iraqi public. Currently U.S. combat troops are slated to leave Iraq by December 31, 2011. If the SOFA referendum failed, they would have to leave in January 2011. Members of the United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqi Islamic Party also said a referendum was unnecessary. Lawmakers are currently busy trying to push through a new parliamentary election law as well. Together that probably means there will be no SOFA referendum, unless Maliki really pushes it since one of his campaign issues is the exit of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Well, One Out of Three Ain’t Bad

Eric Martin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:59:01 +0000

At long last, the Obama administration has provided a draft of its objectives with respect to the ongoing military occupation of Afghanistan, as well as a series of metrics for gauging the success in terms of meeting those aims. Unfortunately, the enunciated objectives are themselves typical of the muddled and contradictory goals, tactics and strategies associated with a mission that has lost both its mooring and rudder. From Josh Rogin’s summary:

The draft document focuses on three main objectives: disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan, working to stabilize Pakistan, and working to achieve a host of political and civic goals in Afghanistan. Each objective has a list of metrics beneath it, although many of these are more goals than concrete milestones that could be measured in any factual way. [emph. added]

The metrics span just about every conceivable issue, including progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable, to support for human rights, to public perceptions of security, to volume and value of narcotics.

A partial list of the cross purposes is as follows: A continued military operation in Afghanistan that (even if inadvertently) weakens Pakistan vis-a-vis India is not going to stabilize the situation in Pakistan (nor garner the full support of the Pakistani government). Along those lines, operations against Pakistani Taliban elements in pursuit of eliminating supply lines and redoubts for Afghan Talibs is not going to stabilize Pakistan either. Quite the contrary, such activities are creating a sizable anti-US, anti-Pakistani government backlash – pushing moderates and religious extremists together in common cause – and provoking Pakistani Taliban to attack the Pakistani government.

In general terms, this radicalization and escalation are only logical: large foreign military occupations pursuing narrow, self-serving interests and in the process bending local powers to its purposes rarely bring about stability, peace and regional harmony. Absent an unrestrained brutality that we will not and should not unleash.

As for the metric of achieving “progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable,” again, this aim is undercut by the underlying policy of military occupation of Afghanistan. Consider the actual metrics:

Progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable and free of military involvement
Pakistan’s actions to take necessary steps to ensure economic and financial stability, job creation, and growth
Support for human rights
Development of an enduring, strategic partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan
Pakistani public opinion of government performance
Demonstrable action by government against corruption, resulting in increased trust and confidence of the Pakistani public

Our policy is wildly unpopular in Pakistan. We are viewed by large swathes of the population as, alternatively, an imperial power and a Western crusader intent on weakening a powerful Muslim nation (and seizing its nukes). The government in power is viewed as a quisling regime installed and/or controlled by us.

How is a continuation of the policy that gives rise to such sentiment going to aid the “[d]evelopment of an enduring, strategic partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan”? Further, in an environment like the one stoked by such policies, how can the US simultaneously support democracy and seek to ensure a compliant Pakistani government? After all, it is at least likely that any government that emerges from a fair democratic process, if representative of public sentiment, would reject these particular US policies in the region.

Even Hamid Karzai had to engage in massive fraud to achieve his “free and fair” electoral victory – a testament to the complications elections and democracy can bring about. A similar outcome (or perceived outcome) in Pakistan in order to preserve the opportunity to pursue an unpopular policy would directly undermine each and every one of the enumerated metrics above.

Legitimacy is not won that way. And if legitimacy is a prerequisite for success in counterinsurgency operations, well then, we’re doing it wrong.

A Precedent that will Reach to Himself

Eric Martin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:06:14 +0000

Andrew Sullivan is right:

The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:

Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.

Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.

The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. [emphasis added]

Don’t it make you proud? Don’t you wonder why the Obama administration would want to politicize criminal conduct by actually investigating torture and holding those that tortured accountable under the law?

As for the techniques, maybe we took diapering tips from the North Koreans, one of our new sources of emulation. And for those that don’t consider the use of sleep deprivation and stress positions (let alone waterboarding) torture, here are some passages from Kim Yong’s horrific tale of torture at the hands of the North Korean regime, some of whose torture methods Dick Cheney and George Bush adopted for the US government:

I was completely sleep deprived and could not react any longer. I had lost track of how many hours or days had passed. But I knew that if I told them what they wanted to hear, there would be no other punishment but a death sentence waiting for me. At moments, the sleep deprivation became so severe that I simply wanted to surrender, but I bit my lips to remain silent. As time went by, the interrogators became more and more furious.

Kim Yong was subjected to certain forms of physical torture that even Cheney didn’t push for, such as bamboo under the fingernails and electric shocks. And yet, according to Yong, stress positions were amongst the most grueling:

One of the worst tortures I endured was to have my body, waist down, submerged in water in a tiny cell that prohibited me from moving. The cell was so tiny that I had to bend slightly in order to fit my body in…[Later] they put me in solitary confinement in a tiny cell about two feet wide and five feet long and ordered me not to move an inch. When I couldn’t bear the pain any longer, they brought me blank paper and made me write confessions.

Ironically, the Republican Party, which has come to stand for full throated support of torture for various categories of detainees (inevitably, and in practice, the innocent and guilty), is prone to flag lapel pin demagoguery and other ostentatious displays of ostensible patriotism. And yet, Party members seem entirely unaware of just how contrary their support of torture is to the vision of the revered, if only in the abstract, founding fathers (let alone the more recent object of adulation, Ronald Reagan).

Consider that George Washington, then facing a truly existential crisis, refused to allow prisoners to be tortured – even as the fledgling republic teetered on a precipice in the midst of an improbable military campaign against the British. Thomas Paine, too, offers no equivocation (via Glenn Greenwald):

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. [...]

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto…

And yet the torture cheerleaders attack the patriotism of those that would uphold the values of Washington, Paine, Jefferson, Madison and, even, Reagan - as opposed to the policies and values of Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington.

Tell me again which group is truly defending America and the ideals we aspire to?

I’d Rather be Famous than Righteous or Holy

Eric Martin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:52:53 +0000

Ben Smith is impressed with the Obama administration’s relatively low-key approach to counterterrorism:

One of the most striking differences between the Obama and Bush administration is the handling of domestic terror arrests. The Bush White House trumpeted every arrest and disrupted plot — in some cases, ones that were nowhere close to fruition — as a major win in the War on Terror and a reminder of the need to be vigilant.

The Obama administration, by contrast, keeps them relatively quiet. There hasn’t been a statement from the White House, or any comment save a Justice Department press release, on the arrest of seven men on charges that they helped raise money and provide training for attacks in Israel, and trained to participate in attacks in Israel and Kosovo.

The decision not to talk about terrorism is just that — a choice, with the goal of ending the "politics of fear" that Obama denounced during the campaign.

While dialing back the fever pitch of fear is beneficial in a number of ways – not the least of which is crafting policies based in reason rather than emotion - the understated approach is also a counterterrorism tactic in and of itself. As Marc Sageman makes abundantly clear in Leaderless Jihad, publicity and fame are coveted by would-be terrorists, and depriving that oxygen from the movement is crucial. Here is Sagemen from a piece discussing that book:

There has been talk of an al-Qaeda resurgence, but the truth is that most of the hard core members of the first and second waves have been killed or captured. The survival of the social movement they inspired relies on the continued inflow of new members. But this movement is vulnerable to whatever may diminish its appeal among young people. Its allure thrives only at the abstract fantasy level. [...]

Terrorist acts must be stripped of glory and reduced to common criminality. Most aspiring terrorists want nothing more than to be elevated to the status of an FBI Most Wanted poster. “[I am] one of the most wanted terrorists on the Internet,” Younis Tsouli boasted online a few months before his arrest in 2005. “I have the Feds and the CIA, both would love to catch me. I have MI6 on my back.” His ego fed off the respect such bragging brought him in the eyes of other chat room participants. Any policy or recognition that puts such people on a pedestal only makes them heroes in each other’s eyes — and encourages more people to follow the same path.

It is equally crucial not to place terrorists who are arrested or killed in the limelight. The temptation to hold press conferences to publicize another “major victory” in the war on terror must be resisted, for it only transforms terrorist criminals into jihadist heroes. The United States underestimates the value of prosecutions, which often can be enormously demoralizing to radical groups. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs. No jihadi Web site publishes such pictures. Arrested terrorists fade into oblivion. Only martyrs live on in popular memory. [emphasis added]

It would be nice to think that the Obama administration is heeding the advice of people like Marc Sageman.

We Chiseled and We Switched

Eric Martin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:01:58 +0000

I don’t envy President Obama’s predicament in Afghanistan. It’s hard to think of a region that has been less hospitable to foreign interlopers throughout ancient and modern history (earning itself the moniker "Graveyard of Empires"). And yet despite this foreboding track record, it is unclear that President Obama is willing to deviate from that familiar, if tragic, path traveled most recently by Britain and the USSR. Not that Obama’s options are all that attractive. Bush left him with a mismanaged and directionless occupation to unwind (or not). The exact nature of the hoped-for success via a continued military occupation is hard enough to define, let alone achieve, yet withdrawal has its downsides as well – including the potential for an intense civil war and the return of repressive elements such as the Taliban.

While entirely too much has been made of the importance of Afghan safe havens in terms of conducting successful terrorist attacks (just as too little has been made of the ability to replicate similar safe havens elsewhere and our ability to disrupt any such haven from afar now that we are making such interdiction a priority), there is little doubt that Obama would pay a steep political price if he were to withdraw and an attack occurred that had some traceable connection to Afghanistan. While an attack emanating from hubs in, say, Europe or Yemen may be just as (or more) likely, those connections would not prove as damaging despite the underlying reality of the terrorist threat.

So it is that Obama seems to be trading Bush’s muddled vision of Afghanistan for his own, with a vague yet grandiose (if often contradictory) recitation of implausible goals and exaggerated fears, all buttressed by a refusal to acknowledge the costs of continuing our occupation. As if they were trivial (think trillions of dollars – less than the costs of health care that has Washington in a tizzy, but then wars never seem to count as spending). As Rory Stewart suggests, it’s almost impossible to decipher an actual policy direction from the pomp and flourish:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions. [...]

Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’

These connections are global: in Obama’s words, ‘our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others.’ Or, as a British foreign minister recently rephrased it, ‘our security depends on their development.’ Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.’

This policy rests on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state. Even if the invasion was justified, that does not justify all our subsequent actions. If 9/11 had been planned in training camps in Iraq, we might have felt the war in Iraq was more justified, but our actions would have been no less of a disaster for Iraqis or for ourselves. The power of the US and its allies, and our commitment, knowledge and will, are limited. It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya – control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government – are lacking in Afghanistan.

He continues, highlighting some points that I have been making regarding the mythic importance of "safe havens":

Even if – as seems most unlikely – the Taliban were to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security. Would they repeat their error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaida? And how safe would this safe haven be? They could give al-Qaida land for a camp but how would they defend it against predators or US special forces? And does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?

Furthermore, there are no self-evident connections between the key objectives of counter-terrorism, development, democracy/ state-building and counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for state-building. You could create a stable legitimate state without winning a counter-insurgency campaign (India, which is far more stable and legitimate than Afghanistan, is still fighting several long counter-insurgency campaigns from Assam to Kashmir). You could win a counter-insurgency campaign without creating a stable state (if such a state also required the rule of law and a legitimate domestic economy). Nor is there any necessary connection between state-formation and terrorism. Our confusions are well illustrated by the debates about whether Iraq was a rogue state harbouring terrorists (as Bush claimed) or an authoritarian state which excluded terrorists (as was in fact the case).

It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Yet the current state-building project, at the heart of our policy, is justified in the most instrumental terms – not as an end in itself but as a means towards counter-terrorism.

With so convoluted a policy, with its mosaic of cross-purpose justifications and strategies, it is no surprise that Obama’s choice of McChrystal (a noted counter-terrorism practitioner – aka, a "killer") was curious given the underlying rhetoric and nod in the direction of counterinsurgency ("COIN", noted for its population centric concern and restraint in terms of the use of force). As Judah Grunstein suggests to explain this apparent contradiction:

…[It seems that] the COIN rhetoric is simply a scaffolding that’s been slapped over a strategy that has neither the resources, the political will, nor the local support necessary to succeed.

Those limitations are real. Even the Afghan optimists (the COIN experts that think that we must "succeed," and that we have a shot at succeeding) think that our only hope is to commit tens of thousands more troops for at least the next decade at a price tag (when combined with non-military outlays) in the neighborhood of several trillions of dollars. Oh, and even then we’ll only succeed if we also eradicate the poppy crop and reorder Pakistan’s society while we’re creating a stable Afghanistan.

As unrealistic an allocation of resources (and set of goals) as that may seem, it actually gets worse. Back to Stewart:

In pursuit of this objective, Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans.

Given the unappetizing, politically unpalatable menu of options available in terms of crafting an Afghanistan policy, Obama seems to be picking and choosing ala carte, while vastly overselling the risk of starvation, as well as the sumptuousness of the feast – a meal that is doomed as much by the basic ingredients as by their haphazard combination. If the recent escalation is part of one last push to try to set a decent stage for fuller withdrawal, so be it. But mission creep is an omnipresent concern with so amorphous and ambitious a set of goals (already there is talk that McChrystal will request thousands more troops from Obama in the near future – one wonders what the response will be and under what rationale?).

Unless and until Obama scales back his goals, and takes a more measured reckoning of the actual costs of withdrawal (total or partial), the policy manifestations will continue to be plagued by an incoherent blend of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, targeting segments of the Afghan population while ostensibly under the rubric of population centric protection, air strikes and hearts and minds, nation building and piecemeal aid, erecting a centralized state and showing sensitivity to the local culture of decentralization, etc., all sold using the ominous rhetoric of an existential threat and the resource allocation of a middling concern.