Citing two counterterrorism intelligence specialists who have followed the development of the Taliban closely, Gareth Porter charged in an IPS column Saturday that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen misrepresented the now conflictual relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, claiming instead that they have become "symbiotic."[1] -- In fact, said Arturo Munoz, the Taliban is "a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda." -- Rick Nelson, another intelligence professional, agrees: "The Taliban is a nationalist organization, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States." -- In a related Dec. 1 IPS column, Porter described how the Obama administration initially resisted the argument that Obama eventually ended up using in his West Point speech, but the president's political vulnerability to appearing to differ from his national security team ultimately led him to succumb to Pentagon pressure: "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was determined to turn the White House around on the issue of McChrystal’s request. He was well aware of Obama’s political sensitivity about not being seen as on the wrong side of his national security team, and he effectively used that to force the issue."[2] -- In the struggle over policy, Gates and his allies "defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support." -- "It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House," Porter said. -- However, Obama's "conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan." ...
1.
PENTAGON'S WAR PITCH BELIED BY TALIBAN-QAEDA CONFLICT
By Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service
December 5, 2009
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49553
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.
But that argument is flatly contradicted by the evidence of fundamental conflicts between the interests of the Taliban and those of al Qaeda that has emerged in recent years, according to counterterrorism and intelligence analysts specializing in Afghanistan.
Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, "Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become once again sanctuary for al Qaeda, as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan."
Mullen made the same assertion in even more pointed terms. "[T]o argue that should they have . . . power the Taliban would not at least tolerate the presence of al Qaeda on Afghan soil is to ignore both the recent past and the evidence we see every day of collusion between these factions on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," he said. "Put simply, the Taliban and al Qaeda have become symbiotic," said Gates, "each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other."
It is well known among government officials working on Afghanistan and al Qaeda, however, that serious tensions between the two organizations emerged after the attack on the "Red Mosque" in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad in July 2007. Western intelligence quickly discovered the attack was an al Qaeda operation, and that it marked the beginning of an al Qaeda campaign calling for the overthrow of the Pakistani government and military.
That created a serious conflict between al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to specialists who followed the issue closely. The Taliban leadership, which is based in Quetta, Pakistan, had been depending on assistance from the Pakistani military to increase its military capabilities and did not look kindly on that al Qaeda policy.
Despite widespread confusion over the two, the Tahreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group that has been an umbrella organization for the military campaign against the Pakistani military, is not related to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Pakistani group, which has now changed its name, is a close ally of al Qaeda, but does not see eye to eye with the Afghan Taliban.
Ignoring these turning points in the Taliban’s relationships with both al Qaeda and other Pakistani jihadi groups, Gates suggested that the three groups are closer than ever before. "What we have seen in the last year develop is an unholy alliance, if you will, of al Qaeda, the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan," he said.
Two former counterterrorism intelligence specialists who followed the Taliban closely until earlier this year told IPS this week that the facts do not support the portrayal by Gates and Mullen of the Taliban and al Qaeda as ideologically united.
"We make a serious mistake in equating the two organizations," said Arturo Munoz, who was a supervisory operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center from 2001 to 2009 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Munoz called the Taliban "a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda."
"It is well known that deals have been made between the Taliban and Pakistani commanders," said Munoz. "Obviously the Quetta Shura [the top Taliban leadership organ] is located there because of a deal with the Pakistani government."
But al Qaeda’s view has been different. "The more fanatical al Qaeda types say ‘let’s tear apart Pakistani society,’" he observed.
Veteran specialist on counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Rick "Ozzie" Nelson agreed that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban that has evolved in recent years is very different from the one they had up to 2001.
"The Taliban is a nationalist organization, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States," said Nelson, who was on the inaugural staff of the National Counter-Terrorism Center’s Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.
Nelson directed a Joint Task Force in Afghanistan until early 2009 and is now in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"The Red Mosque was a big deal," Nelson recalled. The al Qaeda-directed assault on the mosque and subsequent Taliban reaction to its jihadist campaign in Pakistan were what convinced officials that "their goals have become more divergent," he said.
More recently, counterterrorism analysts have noted that the gap has widened even further, as the Taliban leadership has gone public with a "nationalist" line that openly departs from al Qaeda’s global jihadist stance.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s Sep. 19 message for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, called the Taliban a "robust Islamic and nationalist movement" which "wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect."
The message went on to assure "all countries" that a Taliban state "will not extend its hand to jeopardize others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardize us."
In October, the Taliban sent a letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization repeating its offer of good relations, despite the fact that at least three of its member states (China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) are the targets of armed resistance by jihadi allies of al Qaeda.
That line of thinking has created a firestorm among commentators associated with the al Qaeda global jihad worldview, according to Vahid Brown, research associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. In an article published on the *Foreign Policy* magazine website Oct. 21, Brown cited a series of angry responses to the Taliban leader’s message from jihadi publicists across the Middle East.
One rejoinder from one of the most influential jihadi ideologues referred to the Omar message as "dangerous utterances," likening the nationalist line taken in it to the refusal of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to support the Chechen jihad against the Russian government, which is anathema to the global jihadi community.
Later discussions on several jihadi Internet forums clearly recognized that a major rift had developed between al Qaeda and the Taliban. One commenter even referred to "the beginning of the end of relations" between the two.
Gates tired to minimize such evidence by suggesting that Taliban officials are engaging in deception. He said Taliban leaders "recognize that the reason they are not in power right now is because they allowed al Qaeda to launch attacks against the United States," and referred to reports that "the Taliban is saying, ‘Well let’s downplay the relationship with al Qaeda so we don’t get hit again.’"
What Gates failed to mention is that Taliban officials are furious at Osama bin Laden’s attacks against the United States, because he had given a written pledge, referred to by Mullah Omar in a June 2001 interview with conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, not to attack any other country from his Afghan base.
President Barack Obama appears to have been informed about the evidence of divergent Taliban and al Qaeda interests. Senior administration officials told the *New York Times* in early October, evidently with the encouragement of the White House, that the Taliban was now viewed by the national security team as a group that did not have "ambitions to attack the United States."
2.
OBAMA HAD REJECTED HIS OWN SPEECH'S SURGE RATIONALE
By Gareth Porter
Dissident Voice
December 1, 2009
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49495
or
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/obama-had-rejected-his-own-speechs-surge-rationale/
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security.
Obama said the escalation was for a “vital national interest” and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks “are now being planned as I speak.”
Despite Obama’s embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops -- the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda.
Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.
But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.
In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter’s troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al Qaeda strategy.
The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal’s “initial assessment,” with its warning of “mission failure” if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in the *Washington Post* Sept. 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.
One of the anonymous senior officials criticized a statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would “probably need more forces.”
To avoid being outmaneuvered by the military, Obama suggested in a press conference that the legitimacy of the Afghan government might now be so damaged by the blatantly fraudulent Aug. 20 election as to put into question a counterinsurgency strategy such as the one advanced in McChrystal’s assessment.
Obama also raised a red flag about the conventional argument from national security, saying he wasn’t going to “think that by sending more troops, we’re automatically going to make Americans safe.”
Within a week, his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, began to raise that issue explicitly.
In an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Jones suggested the question of why al Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan would be one that the White House would be raising in response to McChrystal’s troop request.
McChrystal’s rejoinder came in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London Oct. 1, in which he went further than any previous official rationale for the war. “[W]hen the Taliban has success,” said McChrystal, “that provides sanctuary from which al Qaeda can operate transnationally.”
He was apparently arguing the Taliban wouldn’t even have to seize power nationally to provide a sanctuary for al Qaeda.
Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that “senior administration officials” were saying privately that Obama’s national security team was now “arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States.”
That “shift in thinking,” as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.
One of the senior officials interviewed by Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that “does not express ambitions of attacking the United States.” The Taliban were aligned with al Qaeda “mainly on the tactical front”, said the official.
A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country -- quite a different goal from that of the counterinsurgency war proposed by McChrystal.
That was an expression of resistance to what was soon reported to be a McChrystal request for a “low risk” option of 80,000 troops, combined with a suggestion that 20,000 troops would be the “high risk” option.
But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was determined to turn the White House around on the issue of McChrystal’s request. He was well aware of Obama’s political sensitivity about not being seen as on the wrong side of his national security team, and he effectively used that to force the issue.
Gates worked with McChrystal, Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a plan that would be presented to the White House as their consensus position on Afghanistan strategy.
The plan, as the New York Times reported Oct. 27, was presented by an administration official as a compromise between the plan put forth by Vice President Joseph Biden for concentrating essentially on al Qaeda, and McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. It would be ostensibly aimed at protecting about 10 population centers, leaving the rest of the country to be handled by Special Operations Forces with the assistance of drones and air power.
But the catch was that McChrystal was demanding an expansive definition of “population centers”, which would include most of the Taliban heartland of the country.
McChrystal was still going to get his counterinsurgency war under the Gates plan.
Notably absent from the Times report was any suggestion that Obama had given even tentative approval to the proposal. Only Obama’s advisers were said to be “coalescing around” the proposal. But “administration officials” confidently asserted that the only issue remaining was how many more troops would be required to “guard the vital parts of the country”.
That confidence was evidently based on the fact that Obama’s national security team had already agreed on the options that would be presented to the president for decision. Two weeks after that report, Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said he would consider four different options at a meeting with his national security team Nov. 11.
The four options, as the Times reported the day of the meeting, ranged from a low-end option of 20,000 to roughly 40,000 troops. And Gates, Mullen and Clinton had “coalesced around” the middle option of about 30,000 troops.
Gates and his allies had thus defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support. And the fact that Obama’s national security was lined up in support of that option was already on the public record.
It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.
Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.
Obama’s speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.
--Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. Read other articles by Gareth, or visit Gareth's website.
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