Index of good news

USA Today reports:

European and Asian companies are beating their American rivals into Iraq now that security has improved the investment climate, Iraq and U.S. officials say.

"It's starting to turn … and the people who are getting in on the ground floor are not American," said Paul Brinkley, the Pentagon official who is leading U.S. efforts to help Iraq rebuild its economy. "It's ironic."

Foreign companies, including U.S. investors, have committed to deals worth about $500 million so far this year and Brinkley expects at least $1 billion in foreign investment by the end of the year.

Duh - Rand Report April 2008

This Rand conclusion in the recent released "Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan" seems almost too intuitively obvious to post but given the lack of confidence in common sense -in spite of the fact is is often so much more sensible than "expert" advice - I post it anyway:

...the most successful information operations were from indigenous actors such as religious, tribal, and political leaders - often without U.S. assistance.

"Catastrophic success" in Afghanistan?

That is how a recent operation by Company C of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is being characterized. Today's NYT reports:

The district of Garmser, a fertile valley along the Helmand River, had been under control of the Taliban and members of Al Qaeda for most of the last two years and much of it had become a war zone, as the Taliban traded fire with British troops based in the district center. One of the largest poppy-growing areas in the country, Garmser District has been an important infiltration route for the insurgents, sending weapons and reinforcements to the north and drug shipments to the south to the border with Pakistan.

And check this out:

But Company C served in Anbar Province, once one of the most intractably violent areas of Iraq, which quieted last year under a new strategy of empowering local groups called Awakening Councils, which now provide security.

The marines were confident they could put that experience to good use here.
Only when you win over a critical balance of the local population and empower them to stand up to the insurgents can you turn the situation around, several marines said.
First Lt. Mark Matzke led a platoon for nine months last year in the Anbar city of Ramadi, where he said he got to know every character in a small neighborhood, both the troublemakers and the power brokers. But it was only when he sneaked in after dark and listened to people’s grievances in private that he was able to work out a strategy for protecting them from the insurgents.

“Through listening to their grievances, you could figure out that the people did not like the insurgents,” he said. But their biggest fear was that the marines would pull out, he said, leaving them at the mercy of insurgents who would treat them as collaborators.

As trust was built up, the people began to side with the marines and started to tip them off about who the insurgents were and where to find them. “You just need to give them confidence,” he said.

Villagers are still skeptical about how long the situation will last as the NYT goes on to report:

“I don’t think I will go back until complete peace and security comes,” said one elder, who said he had heard his house had collapsed under bombardment. “This is not the first time we have suffered. Several times we have seen such operations against the Taliban, and after some time the forces leave the area and so the Taliban find a way to return.”

“If NATO really wants to bring peace and make us free from harm from the Taliban,” he said, “they must make a plan for a long-term stay, secure the border area, install security checkpoints along the border area, deploy more Afghan National Army to secure the towns and villages, and then the people will be able to help them
with security."

Here's an offer that bears consideration

A leader of the tribal revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq told The New York Sun that he would be happy to send military advisors to Afghanistan. The NY Sun continues:

Sheik Ahmad al-Rishawi told The New York Sun that in April he prepared a 47-page study on Afghanistan and its tribes for the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Kabul, Christopher Dell.

...The success of the Anbari tribal rebellion known as the awakening spurred Multinational Forces Iraq to try to emulate the model throughout Iraq, including with the predominately Shiite tribes in the south of the country.

..."Al Qaeda is an ideology," Sheik Ahmad said. "We can defeat them inside Iraq and we can defeat them in any country."

...Of his meeting with Mr. Bush, Sheik Ahmad said he was impressed. "He is a brave man. He is also a wise man. He is taking care of the country's future, the United
States' future. He is also taking care of the Iraqi people, the ordinary people in Iraq. He wants to accomplish success in Iraq."

...In Washington, Sheik Ahmad also met with some members of Congress. He said he told them that American soldiers should stay in Iraq for at least as long as it takes to rebuild Iraq's national army. The Democratic majority in Congress has tried and failed to mandate deadlines for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq regardless of conditions on the ground.

"We have to rebuild a national Iraqi army, not built on sects, but the same way they built up the Anbar police," he said. "They must be well-armed, so they will be able to protect the country and all the American interests in the area. We also have to make a friendship treaty based on mutual respect between the two parties, and then the United States will be able to withdraw from Iraq, if they wish, and we will succeed in Iraq the same way America succeeded in Japan and Germany."

..."We fully trust the Americans. We know the United States never in its history occupied a country. On the contrary, they were occupied and they were able to fight the occupier," he said, referring to the American rebellion against the British in 1776.

Taliban fleeing Afghanistan to....Guess where

The New York Times reports:

Marines of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit have been clearing Taliban and foreign fighters from the district of Garmser, in southern Helmand Province, an
important infiltration and drug trafficking route used by the Taliban to supply
insurgents farther north.

“The insurgents, after experiencing these several weeks of pressure below Garmser, are trying to flee to the south, perhaps to go back to the sanctuaries in another country,” said the NATO commander, Gen. Dan K. McNeill.

He did not name Pakistan, but Helmand Province shares a border with Pakistan, and the Taliban and drug traffickers have long used refugee camps across the border as a sanctuary from American firepower.

And look:

Governor Mangal said hundreds of foreign fighters had joined the Taliban in
their fight against marines in Garmser in recent weeks.

But he said they had suffered heavy losses.
Nineteen bodies of foreign fighters were found in one location, he said.

Alas the news is not entirely good given that "close by" places have decided to appease terrorists by offering them safe haven and in Afghanistan, the opium lords still reign. As the Times report continued:

General McNeill, who hands over command of NATO forces in Afghanistan this week
after 16 months in the post, said that if the Taliban and foreign insurgents continued to enjoy free sanctuary outside Afghanistan, their numbers would continue to grow.

He also seemed to warn Pakistan to contain the threat emanating from its land.
“If there are insurgencies in places that are not in Afghanistan, but very close by, and security forces are not taking them on, I don’t think that bodes well for the whole region,” General McNeill said.

Despite the rout of Taliban forces, the general warned that they were not the only problem in Helmand Province and that the enormous opium crop and the powerful drug business posed a comparable threat to Afghanistan’s stability.

Is the Taliban winning or losing?

The London Telegraph quotes the commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, Brig Mark Carleton-Smith:

The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith....

Taliban fighters are apparently becoming increasingly unpopular in Helmand, where they are reliant on the local population for food and water.

"I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment," said Brig Carleton-Smith. "We have reached the tipping point."

Telegraph report suggests that the insurgency is running out of so much juice in Afghanistan, it has to be fought by foreigners:

The number of Afghans involved in the insurgency has also fallen, with increasing numbers of Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and Arabs found dead on the battlefield.

Now how does the NY Times sees the situation? Today's headline: "Taliban Leader Flaunts Power Inside Pakistan" gives us a clue. As the lead paragraphs continue:

With great fanfare, the Pakistani Army flew journalists to a rugged corner of the nation’s lawless tribal areas in May to show how decisively it had destroyed the lairs of the Taliban, including a school for suicide bombers, in fighting early this year.

Then, just days later, the usually reclusive leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, held a news conference of his own, in the same region, to show just who was in charge.

Mehsud, incidentally, is suspected by Pakistani and U.S. authorities of having masterminded the assassination of Benazir Bhutto:

He and his main ally, Qari Hussain, whom officials and associates have described as a highly trained and vicious militant, have methodically built up strongholds in North and South Waziristan — killing uncooperative tribal leaders, recruiting unemployed young men to their jihad and filling the vacuum left by a lack of government services. Now, they also have lieutenants and allies across the tribal region.

In South Waziristan, they run training camps for suicide bombers, some of them children, according to the former Taliban member. Their realm is so secure that in April Mr. Mehsud’s umbrella group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, held a conference of thousands of fighters that culminated in a public execution, according to a local resident

How you wonder do such upstanding guys attract "loyal" followers? The Times continues:

[A former Taliban member] said he had worked in the propaganda wing of Mr. Mehsud’s cohort from May 2006 to May 2007, and left after Mr. Hussain ordered the killing of eight of his relatives in a dispute....

He described Mr. Hussain as a kind of enforcer, a deputy to Mr. Mehsud who would order killings of tribesmen and often personally slit a person’s throat....

Mr. Hussain ran the school for suicide bombers where he would indoctrinate boys as young as 10, the former Taliban member said. “He called every child by his name, and talked to him about life in the next world,” he said.

Does the Times really think the Taliban is winning?

I'm not so sure and frankly, don't care to guess.

But check out how the story ends to see what at least somebody might be angling for here. The Times finishes the story with an interview with a NWFP police inspector, Malik Navid Khan who has a plan how to get rid of the Taliban. First he engages in a little hard selling:

“[The Taliban] are now on the periphery,” Mr. Khan said in an interview. If nothing is done, it could be “a matter of months” before Peshawar falls, he said.

Get it? Buy this idea or die.....So what does Inspector Khan suggest?

To woo young men away from the Taliban, he wants to create a broad “conservation corps” to employ 300,000 men — approximately one from every family — to build roads and bridges in the impoverished tribal region. The men would get a stipend to counter the generous 13,000 rupees (about $200) the Taliban pay some members each month.

“The economic effect will be immediate,” said Mr. Khan, who says he is impatient with a slow-moving $750 million five-year American aid program that began a few months ago. He recites his ideas to the many American development experts who come through his door offering to help.

The Americans all say about his employment plan, modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s: “ ‘We are thinking about it,’ ” he said. “I say: ‘Don’t think about it, do it.’ ”

As to who Inspector Khan has in mind to disperse the $60 million per month this program will cost we will no doubt find out in the Times' follow-up - when Inspector Khan describes phase two of his plan: How each tribal family must now have a Toyota Land Cruiser to keep up with - I mean- get away from the Taliban.