Iraq and Afghanistan

The Shi'a coalition is back together apparently. Their new list, which includes Kurds and a few Sunnis, is referred to as "The Alliance". It has now ranked its list. Number 1 is al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI, the mainline organization with Iranian connections — although it denies any such connection. Number 7 is Shahristani, a spokesman for Ayatollah Sistani. Chalabi is Number 10, a remarkable transformation for an exile (since 1958) who was the darling of the Pentagon before the war, then condemned, and later accused by the Interim government of crimes. Some Al-Sadr candidates are also in the top 25 positions. One can assume that Dawa leaders make up many of the others in this elite group. It is assumed that much of the government that will be established after the election will be made up of persons in the top 25.

Dr. Sharistani, the spokesman for the new Alliance at yesterday's press conference, showed the group's moderation by discussing for the first time in these circles the difficulty of holding an election in Sunni areas with violence at a high level. Suggestions are being made that perhaps there could be a rolling election in which the election in certain areas would be delayed while security forces are brought in temporarily. Another sign of moderation was the presence of Sunni Arabs and Kurds on the platform as the Alliance was announced. One of the seven persons on the platform was Fawaz al Jarba, who is a former Iraqi army major, a Sunni Arab, and leader of the Shamar tribe, one of the largest in Iraq.

Today's paper carries an Op-Ed by two experts on World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that was headed by William Donovan. Interested readers can find a somewhat fuller discussion on-line at this web site.

The main thrust of the argument is that intelligence was much more productive when it was run by a bunch of skilled amateurs who really had the goals of the effort in view, as contrasted with their personal advancement in a large bureaucratic organization. The OSS grew out of an effort by President Roosevelt to improve the foreign intelligence available to him at the beginning of World War II. Then, as now, intelligence was riven by many feuds among agencies, and none of them wanted to share their sources or power with upstarts. The FBI and the military service intelligence groups were the main culprits. Up to the end of the war, this new agency that was supposed to be handling intelligence gathering directly for the President was not granted access to information coming from the breaking of most Axis codes, it had no role in Latin America, and was largely frozen out of the Pacific Theatre of operations by the opposition of leading admirals. Nevertheless it persisted, and did good work developing working relations with the British. It also had a research and intelligence branch that recruited the best and the brightest from American universities, allowing the country to have a much better idea of the enemies they were facing. The OSS also developed an action unit that conducted a wide variety of secret operations behind enemy lines. At the end of the war, Truman was quick to dissolve OSS. Donovan had a poor reputation as an administrator, hated bureaucracy, and was personally disliked by Truman. Since Donovan relied so heavily on the Ivy League for his staff, it is possible that there was a cultural gap here as well (which continues today between the Midwest and Southwest and New England).

But what seems most useful today in thinking about how intelligence should be restructured goes back to the thirties when Roosevelt began to use Donovan as a personal "reporter" on what was going on in the world. He sent him to England to see how resilient they might be, and so forth. The reports back were directly to him. It seems to me that in the highly bureaucratized Washington of today with everyone with their own personal as well as ideological and national agendas, this model might be useful as a supplement. If a President could find a group of five or so persons of different political persuasions who would work silently for him throughout the world as his eyes and ears and personal advisors, he would be in a much improved position to make informed decisions. These advisors should be essentially nameless. They should either be beyond retirement age or have other professions they could easily go back to. One of their tasks should be to find out what people in the existing intelligence communities in this country and elsewhere "really think". They should be able to move comfortably through a variety of cultures and political systems, reporting back what they think is going on or likely to go on. They should be able to have informed opinions on the capabilities of action agencies or military services that might be enlisted in performing needed secret or nonsecret operations.

So much of the world continues to be convulsed by struggles for independence, freedom and rights. We see these struggles as struggles for "democracy", but that is more often our spin than that of the people involved. Frequently, "good government" and "security" are higher priorities than we might expect. But in the realm of individual opportunity, of individual lives rather than nationalistic romance there is a calculus that runs the other way, toward entrance to wider world rather than encasement in small independencies.

Yesterday's paper offers democratic and independent Armenia as an example of a people that "got what it wanted" and yet the people today do not feel they have what they wanted. Independent Armenia drifts. Young people feel trapped in an unimportant place without prospects. Many, young and old, look back to a time when they belonged to the Soviet Union, and they could look forward as individuals to playing a much more positive role in Moscow than they can now. They even treasure the fact that they were educated in Russian and could contribute to that culture. Many people in small European countries have had similar feelings as they emerged into independence. But now with the new Europe developing, their hope is in a new nationality and culture that transcends the limits of their small states. At least the new Europe helps. But Armenia has no such out. It is geographically trapped next to Georgia, another small country in a similar position, and Azerbaijan with which Armenians have little in common aside from mutual antipathy.

One can imagine that these same problems are apparent, or will be apparent, to many Iraqi Kurds as they consider their options. Many Kurds have participated in the larger Iraq society. Indeed, even now the foreign minister of the Interim Government is a Kurd. Yet Kurds want their freedom, their independence. Perhaps the solution would be for all the Kurds to carve out a greater Kurdistan, but this is an unlikely and dangerous perhaps.

One thinks of the dilemma of Taiwan. The Taiwanese are divided between those who developed a different culture with the help of the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and those more purely Chinese who came from the mainland. To some degree these two regional cultures have melted together. Still, today, with the more purely Taiwanese in the majority the country strives for a future that is both Chinese and not Chinese. No longer do they see Taiwan as "China", with its aspiration to reclaim all of China (much as the Armenians dream of a greater Armenia and the Kurds of a greater Kurdistan). But now this ruling group strives for a separate state, a new country, with a different dialect and a different connection to the world. Unlike Armenians, and more like the Iraqi Kurds, the Taiwanese independence movement has little support from the outer world and faces a looming danger of invasion and absorption. If the United States were as dedicated to self-determination in our day as Wilson was in his, we would actively champion the Taiwanese independence movement, and perhaps even Tibetan and Uighur independence movements. Yet today we are more wedded to our relations with the great and looming China, for the sake of what we used to call "the mighty dollar" (which rings a little hollow now).

Friedman’s Op-Ed in yesterday's Times offers an interesting hypothesis on the origin (or at least one origin) of the suicide bombers, of which there seems to be an endless supply in Iraq. He sees the problem beginning with the terrors of the Saddam regime, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and then the ten years of economic decline under Western sanctions in the 1990s. Iraq went from being the country with the most developed middle class in the region to a country of unemployed, without hope, a country from which the middle class and opportunity had essentially emigrated. The result was that when we attacked, we were faced with an already deeply humiliated and hopeless population, one who young people in their desperation had in many cases turned to extremist religious movements, either Shi'a or Sunni. He points out that unlike the situation in Palestine, these bombers commit suicide anonymously, indicating to him the extremity of their desperation. Our worst intelligence failure in his mind is the failure to understand this development in the minds of the people that we attacked. It suggests the complexity of understanding either friends or foes, a complexity that goes far beyond "understanding the culture" in the sense that this understanding is imparted in graduate schools.

Two members of the Defense Intelligence Agency have reported to their Agency, who forwarded the report to the Pentagon, that prisoner abuse has apparently continued long after Abu Ghraib was exposed. Last June they saw prisoners being brought into a detention center in Baghdad with burn marks on their backs and damage to their kidneys. They saw a prisoner being badly beaten up. When they complained to those in charge of the detention center, the DI officials were threatened by those in charge, their photographs confiscated, their car keys impounded, their email screened, and they were warned never to report the information. Reports have also surfaced that the FBI has severely criticized coercive techniques that continue to be used at Guantanamo Bay.

It appears to me that prisoner abuse, often including torture by any definition, has become so much a part of standard operating procedure in some American interrogation and detention facilities that it will take a major effort to change the picture. Abuse and cruelty has become an integral part of the working culture of those inflicting the punishment. If we do not go beyond the surface and attack this problem honestly soon, then America’s reputation will continue to take heavy blows, and unity within the country as well as our erstwhile alliances will be still further eroded.

Kristof in today's op-ed piece takes aim at the Administration's campaign claim that it has the support of many countries in Iraq. Thirty countries have soldiers in Iraq now, although this number will be down to 27 by next month. Eight of our partners have less than one hundred soldiers involved. To get a feeling for what was going on, Kristof talked to the Estonians in the government and outside. He found that they do not intend to increase their force above the 55 they have there now. The major reason is that the population is very opposed to the war. They allow the mission only because they feel it is an insurance policy in case Russia threatens them again. Kristof's belief is that except for Blair's British support this is pretty much the case in the rest of the Coalition. They are just making a show in support of a cause they do not believe in. In fact, many Estonians think the Americans are as bad as the Russians, but better for them because further away.

The latest news is that the effort of the Ayatollah Sistani to bring the different Shiite parties together for the election seems to be failing. A group of parties calling themselves the "Shiite Council have decided to break away from the United Iraqi Alliance that Sistani has sponsored. The disputes are over which parties get the higher positions on the election lists. Most of the people we have heard of before, including Chalabi and Muqtada al-Sadr are staying with the Alliance that is dominated by the Dawa and Sciri parties (the two older wings of the Shiite world in Iraq, the latter being a party considered dominated by Iranians. The Council's chief objection seems to be that there are too many foreigners or exiles in the Alliance list. Although many parties are in the Council, their makeup is unclear. They seem to be more nativist and antiforeign than the main stream, but this is just an impression. Postscript: The next day the report is that the parties have made up, and indeed the project of having one large list including nearly everyone is back on the burners. It is also reported that several Sunni parties are preparing their lists even after they had opposed going ahead with the January elections.

Tuesday, the Times reported another CIA report from Baghdad, supposedly secret. (The leak proofing of the Agency does not seem to have helped. It judged that the security situation was bad and likely to get worse. The main impediments were the lagging ability of the Iraqi security forces and the inability of the government to get economic development going. It has evoked a rejoinder from the Ambassador who says we are doing much better than this estimate. But in military and intelligence circles there is a lot of support for the individual who composed it upon leaving his position in Baghdad. The American government continues on the surface to be upbeat about everything.

The "Fride" research organization in Madrid has provided a useful rundown on the elections in Afghanistan, recent and future. In the presidential election, the fact of significant opposition was important, as was the estimated 70% participation. The campaigning was short and not very meaningful, with most attention being given to trying to obtain concessions from Karzai as a price for withdrawal. Still, some important regional personages opposed Karzai, and two or three overwhelming won in their local areas. The fact, however, that they were largely unknown outside their home territories gave a tremendous advantage to Karzai. The results showed good turnout countrywide, and for women it was higher than expected, except in a few extremely conservative southern areas. Karzai generally did especially well in urban areas. He also won Herat, a surprise (although throwing out Ismail Khan a few weeks ahead of the elections may have accounted for the difference between results here and in the areas won by the Uzbek and Hazara leaders). The Tajik leader Qanooni did not win any large areas, but won 95% in the Panjshir, the center of the resistance against both the Soviets and the Taliban.

Looking toward the elections later this year, the analysis points out that the irregularities in the election that were insignificant with Karzai's overwhelming victory, would not be insignificant in closer elections. 2005 elections will be for district councils, provincial councils, and the lower house of parliament. Since none of these institutions exist at present, carrying out such elections successfully presents quite a challenge. There is a real danger that the local militias of the warlords and captains of the drug trade will be able to capture too large a proportion of the positions for the health of the society. Karzai has shown himself adept at making deals with local powers. Let us hope he can change his approach to get beyond this point. Nevertheless, recent polls show a great deal of popular confidence in the system and the process. Let us hope that the international community can help them attain the brighter future that they expect.