One glimmer of light: While we fear that this newbie Prez has an agenda that tilts rather precipitously toward our erstwhile brethren from long ago, my feeling is that BHO shall -- willy nilly-- need Israel, because he will be in a passel of over-commitment to forces and troubled real estate that will be, frankly, unavoidable.
The intel maven, author of JAWBREAKER, Quds Force (fiction, August 2008) and Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism, and National Leadership: A Practical Guide (November 2008) wrote his latest opus for the incoming head of state. HICNL includes detailed policy references, prescriptions and recommendations. He says that this new prez has assembled a "pretty good team" for the prosecution of the coming operations. But, Berntsen warns, the question is how he will deploy them. How will he manage the counter-insurgency? This, he stresses, is always the key to calm.
The goal for them, he repeats, is not democracy, which will not fly in these untrammeled, wild, unsettled, rocky, primitive, largely uncontemporary regions. The goal is, instead, stability. With a strongman head honcho, either local, or (preferably) American at the top.
The Afghanis have humbled powerful countries before this, and we have only 17,000 guys on the hook to go there with marching porders in the next year, when the number needed to quell the mess is, Berntsen says, at least triple that.
As an optimistic coda, he also maintains we will get UBL sooner or later. He was famously near to killing him at Tora Bora, and that but for a garbled and, yes, bad decision by the former White House, undersourcing and consequent undersupply (now that we are incredulous at the hash being made by the new one, the ''cool" one, the one who's joined at the lip to the Teleprompter, goes on late-night TV and writes out basketball futures), that one we are clearly missing long about now, we would have gotten him.
"Bush made many good moves," he avers, and was "pretty good in decision-making" in general, along with some of the generals, Cheney and so on, but that the missed opportunity was ''heartbreaking'' for being so close, but so wrong when they needed to act on their own. General Petraeus is fixing the fence, he notes. Spectacularly, he allows.
Fascinating tales of stealthy night raids and teen-aged guides, the sons of warlords and various local tribes, sects. A small, deft, silken-masterful cadre taking on hundreds. With few casualties. Fabulous: We are in our Tom Clancy modes, great. Even unheralded, we are better than the US public gets to hear.
The CIA man with a tight, sturdy, almost bullet-like frame says "they like us," even though the Taliban don't, can't. They just "like to kill things." Why do they do it? Not a simplistic single answer. But not the obvious--wrong--one, either. It is not poverty or resentment. It is not the slogans and the low-hanging fruit, elusive earnest explanations that don't take enough into account, either.
The French are doing a good job, he says--better than we hear. The French Foreign Legion model works for this part of the globe. I've been to the rock and sand spit where the French Foreign Legion, the last hope for despairing and reckless men with nothing to lose, go to have a portion of derring do. Or Three. The Comorros, the Lesser and Greater Comorros. Dusty, burning sand, Nothing on the roads but road.
The Poles and Canadians and Brits, too, are doing well. For the rest, they are Katzenjammer Kids--specifically, he says, to laughter, the Germans. Mostly known for being not on the field.
Proper counter-insurgency is the trick. And since 2/3 of the 'police forces' there, "after 11 whole days of training," are completely illiterate and have zero experience of the world outside their humble villages, they cannot be a force to reckon with. They cannot even speak Dari, their national tongue. Instead, they speak Pashto, their dialect, but cannot read/write a word, so their empathy is decidedly opaque. They need to be taught to read/write to become proper restraining forces and military worthy of their salt.
The One has bitten off rather more than he can comfortably chew, and one wonders why, with his anti-military stance--exceedingly clear to a blind man--he adopted this as his pet project, maybe as the way to patronize and convince the armed services that he does not in fact loathe them. Every president has his special project, the way every First Lady becomes identified with Reading or Special Needs Children, Beautification or the like. This novitiate will be adopting Afghanistan as his class assignment.
That initiative in mid-March was a strange and unprecedented one: have soldiers pay for their own meds and healthcare...! Such a thing has never been proposed, even in the bleakest and blackest humor since the starving forces of the Civil War were rag-tagging it back to their one-time hearths. Even then, after a bruising war, the union was a wreck and there was no money left in the treasury. At least Obama retracted that bizarre notion, getting a taste of veteran outrage.
Otherwise, the country has always stood by its soldiery--to do otherwise is to posit an oxymoronic stance v. the country he supposedly loves. I have never heard of such a vile suggestion. Even Stalin --if he had the resources--repaired his military once they were injured. The Obama seems to be scraping the bottom. And this is only his 2nd month.
marion ds dreyfus 20(c)09
