French Leader's Visit With Bush Signals Warming
By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 12, 2007; A04

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine, Aug. 11 -- During Nicolas Sarkozy's visit Saturday, there was no fishing trip like the one Russian President Vladimir Putin enjoyed last month. Not even a game of horseshoes, a Bush family tradition on Walker's Point.

But for the newly inaugurated French president, being welcomed at the Bush compound for a private lunch -- a rare off-the-cuff encounter involving none of the usual diplomatic formalities -- marked a new era in U.S.-French relations. Far from being served "freedom fries," Sarkozy, a conservative who made the startling decision to take his August holiday in the United States, was greeted with a warmth usually reserved for the British, whose "special relationship" with the United States once set it apart from other European countries.

President Bush, famously chilly toward the French in the past, practically beamed as he ushered Sarkozy into his parents' home. This, it seemed, was his kind of Frenchman: a vibrant, confident fellow unafraid enough of French public opinion to vacation in America (he has been staying in New Hampshire, about 50 miles from the Bush compound).

"We're going to give him a hamburger or a hot dog, his choice," Bush said during a brief round of questions with reporters before the lunch began.

Sarkozy preemptively defended his choice of vacation spot -- something Bush, who spends most of his summer break in the sweltering brush of central Texas, has been known to do. "I came to visit the United States on holiday, on vacation, like 900,000 French do every year. It's a great country," Sarkozy said. "I'm very happy to be here. The United States is a close friend of France, and I'm very glad to be able to meet with the president of the United States here today."

He had flown to France for a funeral the day before, and his wife, Cecilia, and children, not feeling well, stayed behind unexpectedly on Saturday. Still, Sarkozy got the full Bush experience.

He and the current president joined former president George H.W. Bush on a boat trip out into the Atlantic. The threesome also sat for a few minutes of diplomatic talk before lunch, White House officials said. Although officials from both countries had been adamant that the two leaders would be unavailable to the media, they suddenly welcomed in a group of reporters before sitting down to lunch.

The Bush grandchildren -- it was not clear exactly which ones -- had made banners welcoming Sarkozy, and a proud grandmother showed them off.

"Did you see the signs the grandchildren made?" former first lady Barbara Bush asked reporters.

"Le signe," her husband said playfully in something approaching French.

That caught the current president's attention. "What language are you speaking?" asked Bush, who has been known to mock people for speaking in foreign tongues.

A reporter tried to ask the jocular president a question.

"Mr. President, aren't you disappointed that -- "

"Never disappointed," Bush interrupted. "Always upbeat. Feeling good, feeling optimistic about life. Thank you. Thank you," Bush said. "Disappointed about what?"

The reporter finished the thought. "About Mrs. Sarkozy not coming?"

Bush immediately contradicted himself. "Of course we are," he said.

Then came a question about the state of U.S.-French relations, evoking a long and eloquent response from Sarkozy.

"The U.S. is a large, big democracy. It's a country of freedom, and it's a country that we've always admired because it's the country that brought a constitution and freedom to the world. And France is friends with democracies, not with dictatorships," said Sarkozy, who said he had recently read a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette that he intended to share with Bush.

"Do we agree on everything? No," Sarkozy continued. "Because maybe even within a family there are disagreements, but we are still a family. And we may be friends and not agree on everything, but we are friends, nevertheless. That's the truth."

Bush tried to match the thought. "Beautiful. Thank you. We've got to go eat a hamburger."

Sarkozy may have been welcome in part because of the political parallel he represents: His victory in France indicated that an unpopular conservative could be succeeded by another conservative, even with a female opponent running in the campaign (sound familiar?). Sarkozy's triumph over Ségolène Royal heartened Republicans in the United States, who said it suggested that a Republican might be able to win in 2008 after all.

Still, Sarkozy has not weighed in on the U.S. elections -- even though he is vacationing in the first-in-the-nation primary state, a pastime often reserved for the candidates.

A colorful character who recently upbraided two photographers for chasing him down during his holiday, he has not met with any presidential candidates during his trip, and the campaigns have said there are no plans for such a rendezvous.

Bush, for his part, said he would consider vacationing abroad in France if Sarkozy were to invite him. In the meantime, he said he was looking forward to heading to Crawford, where his ranch vacation will begin Monday.

Might the president at least speak a few words of French, as a gesture toward the new U.S.-French thaw?

"No, I can't," Bush said. "I can barely speak English."

August 12, 2007
How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad

By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph — a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”

“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “A number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear as a political and military force.”

But that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory was so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care and education, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”

President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator drone spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.

When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study.

By late last year, when the United States began increasing troop levels in Afghanistan to the current level of 23,500, a senior American military commander in the country said he was surprised to discover that “I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts” in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the economy is agricultural. A $300 million project approved by Congress for small businesses in Afghanistan was never financed by the administration.

Underlying many of the decisions, officials say, was a misapprehension about what Americans would find on the ground in Afghanistan. “The perception was that Afghans hated foreigners and that the Iraqis would welcome us,” said James Dobbins, the administration’s former special envoy for Afghanistan. “The reverse turned out to be the case.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration’s policy, saying, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.” Yet she said: “I don’t think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.”

In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington’s record.

“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. “I’m saying the same thing six years later.”

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the United Nations ambassador, said, “I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly,” adding that “I think more could have been done earlier on these issues.”

And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, “The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn’t have to do nation- building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake.”

A Big Promise, Unfulfilled

After months of arguing unsuccessfully for a far larger effort in Afghanistan, Mr. Dobbins received an unexpected call in April 2002. Mr. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America’s commitment to rebuild Afghanistan.

“I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan,” Mr. Dobbins recalled, referring to the American rebuilding of postwar Europe. “I said, ‘No, I saw no objections’, so they put it in the speech.”

On April 17, Mr. Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen. George C. Marshall trained a century ago. “Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings,” Mr. Bush said, calling Marshall’s work “a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow.”

Mr. Bush had belittled “nation building” while campaigning for president 18 months earlier. But aware that Afghans had felt abandoned before, including by his father’s administration after the Soviets left in 1989, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.”

“We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” he said. “We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless. We will stay until the mission is done.”

The speech, which received faint notice in the United States, fueled expectations in Afghanistan and bolstered Mr. Karzai’s stature before an Afghan grand council meeting in June 2002 at which Mr. Karzai was formally chosen to lead the government.

Yet privately, some senior officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld, were concerned that Afghanistan was a morass where the United States could achieve little, according to administration officials involved in the debate.

Within hours of the president’s speech, Mr. Rumsfeld announced his own tough-love approach at a Pentagon news conference.

“The last thing you’re going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure it out. They’re going to have to grab ahold of that thing and do something. And we’re there to help.”

But the help was slow in coming. Despite the president’s promise in Virginia, in the months that followed his April speech, no detailed reconstruction plan emerged from the Bush administration.

Former officials now say the stagnation reflected tension within the administration over how large a role the United States should play in stabilizing a country after toppling a hostile government.

After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, argued in confidential sessions that if the United States now lost Afghanistan, it would damage America’s image, officials said. In a February 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Powell proposed that American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Mr. Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital.

Mr. Powell said in an interview that his model was the 1989 invasion of Panama, where American troops spread out across the country after ousting the Noriega government. “The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means,” he said.

Richard N. Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, said informal conversations with European officials had led him to believe that the United States could recruit a force of 20,000 to 40,000 peacekeepers, half from Europe, half from the United States.

But Mr. Rumsfeld contended that European countries were unwilling to contribute additional troops, according to Douglas J. Feith, then the Pentagon’s under secretary for policy. He said Mr. Rumsfeld felt that sending American troops would reduce pressure on Europeans to contribute, and could provoke Afghans’ historic resistance to invaders and divert American forces from hunting terrorists. Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment.

Some officials said they feared confusion if European forces viewed the task as peacekeeping while the American military saw their job as fighting terrorists. Ms. Rice, despite having argued for fully backing the new Karzai government, took a middle position, leaving the issue unresolved. “I felt that we needed more forces, but there was a real problem, which you continue to see to this day, with the dual role,” she said.

Ultimately, Mr. Powell’s proposal died. “The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan,” Mr. Haass said. “I didn’t see support.”

Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy, said Mr. Powell “seemed resigned.”

“I said this wasn’t going to be fully satisfactory,” Mr. Dobbins recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s the best we could do.’ ”In the end, the United States deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members, and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul.

As an alternative, officials hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves. The United States would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out changes in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

But that meant no one was in overall command, officials now say. Many holes emerged in the American effort.

There were so few State Department or Pentagon civil affairs officials that 13 teams of C.I.A. operatives, whose main job was to hunt terrorists and the Taliban, were asked to stay in remote corners of Afghanistan to coordinate political efforts, said John E. McLaughlin, who was deputy director and then acting director of the agency. “It took us quite awhile to get them regrouped in the southeast for counterterrorism,” he said of the C.I.A. teams.

Sixteen months after the president’s 2002 speech, the United States Agency for International Development, the government’s main foreign development arm, had seven full-time staffers and 35 full-time contract staff members in Afghanistan, most of them Afghans, according to a government audit. Sixty-one agency positions were vacant.

“It was state building on the cheap, it was a duct tape approach,” recalled Said T. Jawad, Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff at the time and Afghanistan’s current ambassador to Washington. “It was fixing things that were broken, not a strategic approach.”

A Shift of Resources to Iraq

In October 2002, Robert Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence center, visited the new Kuwait City headquarters of Lt. Gen David McKiernan, who was already planning the Iraq invasion. Meeting in a sheet metal warehouse, Mr. Grenier asked General McKiernan what his intelligence needs would be in Iraq.

The answer was simple. “They wanted as much as they could get,” Mr. Grenier said.

Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Mr. Grenier said in an interview, “the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,” including the agency’s most skilled counterterrorism specialists and Middle East and paramilitary operatives.

That reduced the United States’ influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to turn over to the central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected as customs payments at border crossings.

While the C.I.A. replaced officers shifted to Iraq, Mr. Grenier said, it did so with younger agents, who lacked the knowledge and influence of the veterans. “I think we could have done a lot more on the Afghan side if we had more experienced folks,” he said.

A former senior official of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which was running both wars, said that as the Iraq planning sped up, the military’s covert Special Mission Units, like Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, shifted to Iraq from Afghanistan.

So did aerial surveillance “platforms” like the Predator, a remotely piloted drone armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the sparsely populated mountains of Afghanistan. Predators were not shifted directly from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the former official, but as new Predators were produced, they went to Iraq.

“We were economizing in Afghanistan,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The marginal return for one more platform in Afghanistan is so much greater than for one more in Iraq.”

The shift in priorities became apparent to Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s former comptroller, when Mr. Rumsfeld called him into his office in the fall of 2002, as planning for the Iraq war was in high gear, and asked him to serve as the Pentagon’s reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. It was an odd role for the comptroller, whose primary task is managing the Defense Department’s $400 billion a year budget.

“The fact that they went to the comptroller to do something like that was in part a function of their growing preoccupation with Iraq,” said Mr. Zakheim, who left the administration in 2004. “They needed somebody, given that the top tier was covering Iraq.”

In an interview, President Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, insisted that there was no diversion of resources from Afghanistan, and he cited recently declassified statistics to show that troop levels in Afghanistan rose at crucial moments — like the 2004 Afghan election — even after the Iraq war began.

But the former Central Command official said: “If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We’d have the ‘black’ Special Forces you most need to conduct precision operations. We’d have more C.I.A.”

“We’re simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq,” the former official added. “Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke.”

A Piecemeal Operation

As White House officials put together plans in the spring of 2003 for President Bush to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq, the Pentagon decided to make a similar, if less dramatic, announcement for Afghanistan.

On May 1, hours before Mr. Bush stood beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared at a news conference with Mr. Karzai in Kabul’s threadbare 19th-century presidential palace. “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities,” he said. “The bulk of the country today is permissive, it’s secure.”

The Afghanistan announcement was largely lost in the spectacle of Mr. Bush’s speech. But it proved no less detached from events on the ground.

Three weeks later, Afghan government workers who had not been paid for months held street demonstrations in Kabul. An exasperated Mr. Karzai publicly threatened to resign and announced that his government had run out of money because warlords were hording the customs revenues. “There is no money in the government treasury,” Mr. Karzai said.

At the same time, the American-led training of a new Afghan Army was proving far more difficult than officials in Washington had expected. The new force, plagued by high desertion rates, had only 2,000 soldiers. The Germans’ effort to train police officers was off to an even slower start, and the British-led counternarcotics effort was dwarfed by an explosion in the poppy crop. Already small groups of Taliban fighters had slipped back over the border from Pakistan and killed aid workers, stalling reconstruction in the south.

A senior White House official said in a recent interview that in retrospect, putting different countries in charge of different operations was a mistake. “We piecemealed it,” he said. “One of the problems is when everybody has a piece, everybody’s piece is made third and fourth priority. Nobody’s piece is first priority. Stuff didn’t get done.”

A month after his announcement in Kabul, Mr. Rumsfeld presented a new strategy to the White House aimed at weakening warlords and engaging in “state building” in Afghanistan. In some ways, it was the approach Mr. Rumsfeld had rejected right after the invasion.

Defense Department officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld’s views began to shift after a December 2002 briefing by Marin Strmecki, an Afghanistan expert at the Smith Richardson Foundation, who argued that Afghanistan was not ungovernable and that the United States could turn it into a moderate, Muslim force in the region.

He said that the United States needed to help Afghans create credible national institutions and that Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group and historically the Taliban’s base of support, needed a more prominent role in the government. Mr. Rumsfeld, according to aides, was impressed by Mr. Strmecki’s emphasis on training Afghans to run their own government and hired him.

Then another personnel change helped alter Afghanistan policy. Mr. Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who was a senior National Security Council official and a special envoy to Iraq exiles, was appointed ambassador to Afghanistan.

Mr. Khalilzad said he accepted the job after Mr. Bush promised that the effort in Afghanistan would be vastly expanded. “We had gotten the president to a significant increase,” Mr. Khalilzad recalled in an interview.

A leading neo-conservative, Mr. Khalilzad could get Ms. Rice or — if need be — Mr. Bush on the phone. He had been a counselor to Mr. Rumsfeld and had worked for Dick Cheney when Mr. Cheney was the first President Bush’s defense secretary. “Zal could get things done,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former American military commander in Afghanistan.

When Mr. Khalilzad arrived in Kabul on Thanksgiving 2003, he was carrying nearly $2 billion — twice the amount of the previous year — as well as a new military strategy and private experts to intensifying rebuilding.

They started a reconstruction plan dubbed “accelerating success” that involved the kind of nation-building once dismissed by the administration. General Barno expanded the military’s “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” to build schools, roads and wells and to win the “hearts and minds” of Afghans. The teams amounted to a smaller version of the force Mr. Powell had proposed 18 months earlier.

By January 2004, Afghanistan had reached a compromise on a new Afghan Constitution. With American backing, Mr. Karzai weakened several warlords. In October 2004, Mr. Karzai, who had been appointed president, was elected. At the same time, NATO countries steadily sent more troops to Afghanistan, and soon Mr. Rumsfeld — pressed for troops for Iraq — proposed that NATO take over security for all of Afghanistan. By the spring of 2005, Afghanistan appeared to be moving toward the success Mr. Bush had promised. But then, fearing that Iraq was spinning out of control, the White House asked Mr. Khalilzad to become ambassador to Baghdad.

A Lingering Threat

Before departing Afghanistan, Mr. Khalilzad fought a final battle within the administration. It was a fight that revealed divisions within the American government over Pakistan’s role in aiding the Taliban, a delicate subject as the Bush administration tried to coax cooperation out of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

In an interview with on Afghan television, Mr. Khalilzad noted that Pakistani journalists had recently interviewed a senior Taliban commander in Pakistan. He questioned Pakistan’s claim that it did not know the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders — a form of skepticism discouraged in Washington, where the administration’s line had always been that General Musharraf was doing everything he could.

“If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country, which has nuclear bombs, and a lot of security and military forces, not find them?” Mr. Khalilzad asked.

Pakistani officials publicly denounced Mr. Khalilzad’s comments and denied that they were harboring Taliban leaders. But Mr. Khalilzad had also exposed the growing rift between American officials in Kabul and those in Islamabad.

Mr. Grenier said that when he was the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad the issue of fugitive Taliban leaders was repeatedly raised with senior Pakistani intelligence officials in 2002. “The results were just not there,” Mr. Grenier recalled. “And it was quite clear to me that it wasn’t just bad luck.”

Pakistani had backed the Taliban throughout the 1990s as a counterweight to an alliance of northern Afghan commanders backed by India, Pakistan’s bitter rival. Pakistani officials also distrusted Mr. Karzai.

Deciding that the Pakistanis would not act on the Taliban, Mr. Grenier said he urged them to concentrate on arresting Qaeda members, who he said were far more of a threat.

“From our perspective at the time, the Taliban was a spent force,” he said, adding that “we were very much focused on Al Qaeda and didn’t want to distract the Pakistanis from that.”

But Mr. Khalilzad, American military officials and others in the administration argued that the Taliban were crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan and killing American troops and aid workers. “Colleagues in Washington at various levels did not recognize that there was the problem of sanctuary and that this was important,” Mr. Khalilzad said.

But it was not until 2006, after ordering a study on Afghanistan’s future, that Mr. Bush pressed General Musharraf on the Taliban. Later, Mr. Bush told his aides he worried that “old school ties” between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban had not been broken, despite General Musharraf’s assurances.

The Pakistanis, said one senior American commander, were “hedging their bets.”

“They’re not sure that we are staying,” he added. “And if we are gone, the Taliban is their next best option” to remain influential in Afghanistan.

As 2005 ended, the Taliban leaders remained in hiding in Pakistan, waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. Soon, they would find one.

To Afghans, a Fickle Effort

In September 2005, NATO defense ministers gathered in Berlin to complete plans for NATO troops to take over security in Afghanistan’s volatile south. It was the most ambitious “out of area” operations in NATO history, and across Europe, leaders worried about getting support from their countries. Then, American military officials dropped a bombshell.

The Pentagon, they said, was considering withdrawing up to 3,000 troops from Afghanistan, roughly 20 percent of total American forces.

NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said he protested to Mr. Rumsfeld that a partial American withdrawal would discourage others from sending troops.

In the end the planned troop reduction was abandoned, but chiefly because the American ground commander at the time, Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, concluded that the Taliban were returning and that he needed to shift troops to the east to try to stop them. But the announcement had sent a signal of a wavering American commitment.

"The Afghan people still doubt our staying power,” General Eikenberry said. “They have seen the world walk away from them before.”

To sell their new missions at home, British, Dutch and Canadian officials portrayed deployments to Afghanistan as safe, and better than sending troops to Iraq. Germany and Italy prevented their forces from being sent on combat missions in volatile areas. Those regions were to be left to the Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch.

Three months after announcing the proposed troop withdrawal, the White House Office of Management and Budget cut aid to Afghanistan by a third.

A senior administration official said all of the money allocated to Afghanistan the previous year had not been spent. “There was an absorption problem,” Ms. Rice said.

Mr. Neumann, then the ambassador, said he argued against the decision.

But even so, American assistance to Afghanistan dropped by 38 percent, from $4.3 billion in fiscal 2005 to $3.1 billion in fiscal 2006, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.

By February 2006, Mr. Neumann had come to the conclusion that the Taliban were planning a spring offensive, and he sent a cable to his superiors.

“I had a feeling that the view was too rosy in Washington,” recalled Mr. Neumann, who retired from the State Department in June. “I was concerned.”

Mr. Neumann’s cable proved prophetic. In the spring of 2006, the Taliban carried out their largest offensive since 2001, attacking British, Canadian and Dutch troops in southern Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Taliban swarmed into the south, setting up checkpoints, assassinating officials and burning schools. Suicide bombings quintupled to 136. Roadside bombings doubled. All told, 191 American and NATO troops died in 2006, a 20 percent increase over 2005. For the first time, it became nearly as dangerous, statistically, to serve as an American in Afghanistan as in Iraq.

Mr. Neumann said that while suicide bombers came from Pakistan, most Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan were Afghans. Captured insurgents said they took up arms because a local governor favored a rival tribe, corrupt officials provided no services or their families needed money.

After cutting assistance in 2006, the United States plans to provide $9 billion in aid to Afghanistan in 2007, twice the amount of any year since 2001.

Despite warnings about the Taliban’s resurgence from Mr. Neumann, Mr. Khalilzad and military officials, Ms. Rice said, “there was no doubt that people were surprised that the Taliban was able to regroup and come back in a large, well-organized force.”

Divisions Over Strategy

In July 2006, NATO formally took responsibility for security throughout Afghanistan. To Americans and Europeans, NATO is the vaunted alliance that won the cold war. To Afghans it is little more than a strange, new acronym. And NATO and the Americans are divided over strategy.

The disagreement is evident on the wall of the office of Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of the 35,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan, where he keeps a chart that is a sea of yellow and red blocks. Each block shows the restrictions that national governments have placed on their forces under his command. Red blocks represent tasks a country will not do, like hunting Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Yellow blocks indicate missions they are willing to consider after asking their capitals for approval.

In Washington, officials lament that NATO nations are unwilling to take the kinds of risks and casualties necessary to confront the Taliban. Across Europe, officials complain the United States never focused on reconstruction, and they blame American forces for mounting air attacks on the Taliban that cause large civilian casualties, turning Afghans against the West.

The debate over how the 2001 victory in Afghanistan turned into the current struggle is well under way.

“Destroying the Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was an extraordinary strategic accomplishment,” said Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, “but where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not. We were going to face this long war in Afghanistan as long as we and the Afghan government couldn’t bring serious economic reconstruction to the countryside, and eliminate the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistan.”

But Henry A. Crumpton, a former C.I.A. officer who played a key role in ousting the Taliban and became the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, said winning a war like the one in Afghanistan required American personnel to “get in at a local level and respond to people’s needs so that enemy forces cannot come in and take advantage.”

“These are the fundamentals of counterinsurgency, and somehow we forgot them or never learned them,” he added. He noted that “the United States has 11 carrier battle groups, but we still don’t have expeditionary nonmilitary forces of the kind you need to win this sort of war.”

“We’re living in the past,” he said.

Among many current and former officials, a consensus is emerging that a more consistent commitment by the United States may have improved the situation in Afghanistan.

Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure “are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.”

“Symbolically, it’s more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq,” he said. “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.

August 10, 2007
Jordan Yields Poverty and Pain for the Well-Off Fleeing Iraq

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
AMMAN, Jordan, Aug. 9 — After her husband’s killing, Amira sold a generation of her family’s belongings, packed up her children and left behind their large house in Baghdad, with its gardener and maid.

Now, a year later, she is making meat fritters for money in this sand-colored capital, unable to afford glasses for her son, and in the quiet moments, choking on the bitterness of loss.

The war has scattered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis throughout the Middle East, but those who came here tended to be the most affluent. Most lacked residency status and were not allowed to work, but as former bank managers, social club directors and business owners, they thought their money would last.

It has not. Rents are high, schools cost money, and under-the-table jobs pay little. A survey of 100 Iraqi families found that 64 were surviving by selling their assets.

Now, as a new school year begins, many Iraqis here say they can no longer afford some of life’s basic requirements — education for their children and hospital visits for their families. Teeth are pulled instead of filled. Shampoo is no longer on the grocery list.

“My savings are finished,” said Amira, who is 50. “My kids won’t be in school this year.”

It is a painful new reality for an important part of Iraq’s population, the educated, secular center. They refused to take sides as the violence got worse. And their suffering augurs something larger for Iraq. The poorer they grow and the longer they stay away, the more crippled Iraq becomes. “The binding section of the population does not exist anymore,” said Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister, who now spends most of his time in Jordan. “The middle class has left Iraq.”

Iraqis streamed into Jordan and Syria in 2005 and 2006, with the professional class picking Jordan. The signs on the second floor of Al Essra Hospital, a private hospital in central Amman, display only Iraqi doctors’ names. The Jordanians have been relatively lenient, registering doctors in their medical unions and allowing the vast majority to live in their country without residency permits.

But by early this year Iraqis were weighing so heavily on this small country that the Jordanian authorities sharply reduced the numbers they accepted. (Rejections became so common that Iraqi Airways now offers a 30 percent discount to returning passengers who have been turned away.)

Many thought Jordan would be a stop on the way to Australia or Sweden, or a brief vacation from Baghdad’s inferno. But as the months wore on, it became clear that most countries were closed to Iraqis, the war was only getting worse, and families were left stranded, burning through their savings. The Australian authorities twice rejected Hassan Jabr, a Spanish teacher who left his elegant home and garden in Baghdad after his 12-year-old son was kidnapped and killed last year. Now, with his savings gone, badly dented before he left by a $10,000 ransom that he paid to try to get his son back, he is living off his family’s food ration cards that his mother sells in Baghdad.

“We saw reality in Amman and we were shocked,” he said, sitting in his spare one-room apartment in eastern Amman. “We planned for two months.”

Iraqis here have never been formally counted. A survey by a Norwegian group, Fafo, which has not been made public, is expected to report there are less than half of the 750,000 commonly estimated to be in Jordan.

But that is still 10 percent of the population of two million in Amman, where most of the Iraqis live, and aid agencies have stepped up activities.

This month the Jordanian government, under pressure from the United States, agreed to let Iraqi children without residency attend public schools, a right not extended to any other foreigners.

But the schools are crowded and the government has not yet prepared for the change, arguing that it should receive aid to accommodate it. United Nations agencies are asking for extra money to expand, at first by adding new shifts to existing schools.

Save the Children, a humanitarian group, says it has referred 4,000 Iraqis to schools recently, but the referrals do not guarantee acceptance. Amira went to the public school in her neighborhood, but was told that there was no room for her children. Private school cost her $5,000 last year, a third of her savings.

As the middle class becomes poor, new patterns form. Zeinab Majid’s okra stew no longer has meat. She buys her vegetables just before sunset, when the prices are the lowest. A stranger offered her the use of a washing machine, a gesture that nearly brought her to tears.

She came to Amman last September after her husband, a painter, had received two threats, and the studio he used had been bombed. They sold everything. Now her husband, a quiet man in small round glasses, spends his days jabbing paint onto small canvases while their boys, ages 7 and 4, watch cartoons on an old TV. “There are days when I’m penniless completely,” she said, serving juice to visitors. A Catholic relief organization, Caritas, helped pay for first grade for her older son last year.

The pain of the war closes people, and recent arrivals tend to live isolated lives, dividing the community into small, sad pockets. Amira moves mechanically through her days like a stunned survivor of a shipwreck. Tears come easily when she remembers the belongings she sold, the photo albums she did not take. Her husband, a Sunni, died five days after men in police uniforms took him from his shop last year. His face was bruised and his body broken. It was 22 years to the day since they first met.

“They were after the happiness,” she said, her face wet with tears. “They wanted to kill the happiness.”

The United States promised to increase the number of Iraqi refugees it takes, and the United Nations has referred 9,100 Iraqis to it this year. But so far fewer than 200 have arrived, according to the State Department. Several hundred more are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

Running out of money is frightening, and some families choose to move to Syria, where things are cheaper, or, in some cases, back to Baghdad and the war.

Aseel Qaradaghi, a 25-year-old software engineer, was pregnant when she brought her small daughter here last summer after receiving threats from Islamic extremists. Her husband, a translator for a South African security firm, stayed in Baghdad to earn money. But when he did not call on her birthday, she knew something was wrong, and only after pressing his friends on a crackling phone line did she learn that he had been kidnapped.

Now, eight months later, she is earning a small wage at a nursery, but without his salary it is not enough, and she has applied for refugee status. If she is rejected, she will have to return to Baghdad. She does not know her husband’s fate, but worries that it will be the same as her brother’s, killed for working as a translator for the American military.

“I cannot allow myself to think about him,” she said, bouncing her baby boy on her lap. “The moment I start to allow feelings, my life will stop. I’m afraid of the moment that I collapse.”

Last week, Amira had a guest. Nada, a mother of three, whose husband worked as a deputy director of a prestigious social club in Baghdad, was preparing to move to Syria. The thousands of dollars from the sale of several cars and a house are almost gone.

“My daughter was second in her class,” Amira said, her words coming hard and fast. “I traveled all over the world. I want to tell the Americans what has happened to us.”

Yusra al-Hakeem contributed reporting.

Traffic Stops and Thwarted Plots
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Two Middle Eastern men stopped by a sheriff's deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., on Aug. 4 were charged with possession of a destructive device after a search of their vehicle turned up potential bombmaking materials. The suspects, however, contend they were hauling fireworks, which are widely sold at roadside stands in South Carolina, and that they are the victims of an overzealous sheriff's department.
According to Berkeley County Sheriff Wayne DeWitt, the deputy was approaching the suspects' stopped vehicle when he saw one of the men close a laptop computer and attempt to hide it. This raised the deputy's suspicions and he requested permission to search the vehicle. The men consented to the search, noting that they had fireworks in the trunk.

The deputy, however, concluded that the trunk contained more than a few fireworks, and called for backup. The items discovered inside the vehicle include potassium nitrate, sugar, gasoline and PVC pipe. Also found were so-called "hobby rocket igniters" and "hobby fuse," materials that can be used to make both model rockets and pipe bombs. A bomb squad summoned to the scene reportedly performed an operation to break apart, or "disrupt," one section of PVC pipe, which authorities said contained a "suspicious substance."
It is indeed possible that these materials were intended for use in some innocent fun -- though they also could have been used for something far more sinister. Authorities will need to examine all of the evidence more closely to make that determination.
Regardless of the outcome, however, the case serves to highlight the often-overlooked importance of local street cops to the security of the U.S. homeland. Regular patrol officers doing their job can have -- and have had -- a tremendous positive impact on security. Furthermore, with no end in sight to the threats against the U.S. public, they will continue to play an important role.
The Suspects
The two suspects -- 26-year-old Ahmed Abda Sherf Mohamed and 21-year-old Youssef Samir Megahed -- are students are the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. University officials said Aug. 6 that Mohamed, an Egyptian, is a permanent U.S. resident who has been a USF student since 2004, but has no declared major. Megahed, a Kuwaiti, is a civil engineering graduate student who did his undergraduate work in Egypt.
The two men, who are being held in the Berkeley County Jail, are technically eligible for release if they can post their bonds, which were set high ($300,000 for Megahed and $500,000 for Mohamed) because they were deemed to be flight risks. However, a federal detainer reportedly has been filed that would keep the men in custody even if they do raise the necessary bail on the state charges. Furthermore, the FBI has assumed responsibility for the investigation and the two men could face federal charges. The FBI said Aug. 6 it has uncovered no information linking the two men to terrorism.
The Components
Potassium nitrate (or saltpeter) is the oxidizer used in the manufacture of black powder. When potassium nitrate is mixed with sugar and confined -- as in a PVC or metal pipe, thermos bottle or tin can, for instance -- it will function as a low explosive. Indeed, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) manufactured from potassium nitrate are common in many parts of the world. Hobby fuses and rocket igniters could be used to activate such a device.
Potassium nitrate and sugar, however, also can be used as a rocket propellant -- so it is possible the two men intended to make and launch a homemade rocket. The major difference between a bomb and a rocket is the configuration of the PVC pipe. If the pipe was sealed only at one end it might have been intended for use as a rocket (or it was an incomplete IED.) If the PVC pipe was sealed at both ends, it clearly was intended to be an IED. Under the law, however, either construction could be considered a pipe bomb, depending on the details.
Another potentially incriminating item in this case is the gasoline can found in the trunk of the car. Gasoline, which has no application in model rocketry, can be combined with the other materials seized to create an explosive-actuated incendiary device -- which can be more destructive than a pipe bomb alone. Of course, it is possible the men were simply transporting a can of gasoline for innocuous reasons, though it is dangerous to transport gasoline in close proximity to incendiary mixtures, especially in the heat of the South.
Investigators undoubtedly are attempting to determine the men's intent. The laptop computer seized at the scene will be thoroughly reviewed for any evidence of plans to build bombs or rockets. Investigators also will look for any maps, diagrams or photos of potential target sites as well as any jihadist literature and propaganda. They also will search the suspects' residences, review their phone records, scrutinize their past travel and comb over any miscellaneous pocket litter found on the men or in their vehicle. And they will interview friends and associates of the two.
Regardless of whether investigators turn up evidence of a conspiracy to use the device as a bomb, however, the men are facing serious legal problems. The PVC device that was disrupted appears at this point to fit the legal definition of a pipe bomb, which is considered a "destructive device" under federal firearms law. As a result, the two men will likely face federal charges such as possession of an unregistered destructive device and interstate transportation of an unregistered destructive device. Megahed, who is in the United States on a student visa, is not permitted to possess any firearm (which would include a pipe bomb.) So, even if the men were naively transporting the device with the intention of shooting off rockets in the countryside, they are still in trouble.
It is noteworthy that Megahed is an engineering student. Although there is no evidence at this point to indicate that Megahed is anything but a normal student, past cases suggest that radical Muslim youth studying the applied sciences are disproportionately more prone to embrace jihadism than are those who pursue studies in social sciences, humanities, liberal arts, business, etc. In addition to the recently deceased engineer Kafeel Ahmed, the driver of the vehicle used in the Glasgow bombing attempt, some other notable jihadist engineers include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a mechanical engineer; Nidal Ayyad, a chemical engineer; Abdel Basit (a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef), an electrical engineer; Mohammed Atta, a civil engineer; and Ziyad Jarrah, an aircraft engineering student.
Furthermore, USF has been the focus of law enforcement attention in the past because of former computer engineering Professor Sami al-Arian's acknowledged connection to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization. USF also gained attention in 2006, when two Saudi students attending the university were arrested on trespass charges after hitching a ride on a school bus transporting high school students.
An Important Tactical Reality
In a recent analysis we discussed several of the tactical realities that make the job of protecting the United States from attack so challenging. These include transnational and homegrown operatives working in the United States, the many vulnerable targets, the ease of constructing IEDs and the simplicity of staging small-scale IED attacks. Another important tactical reality, however, is the tremendous impact that street cops can have on the security of the U.S. homeland.
Many terrorist plots have been thwarted and dangerous criminals captured by alert officers doing their job. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example, was not captured by some terrorism task force or elite FBI team. McVeigh was arrested shortly after the bombing by an Oklahoma state trooper who noticed McVeigh was driving his vehicle on Interstate 35 without a license plate.
A large federal task force hunted Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph unsuccessfully for more than five years. The task force, which at times had hundreds of federal agents and police officers assigned to it, spent years combing the North Carolina mountains looking for Rudolph. They used bloodhounds, professional trackers and high-tech equipment such as helicopters with infrared sensors. However, Rudolph was arrested by a rookie cop in Murphy, N.C., who found him dumpster-diving for food behind a grocery store.
There also was the little-known 1988 arrest of Japanese Red Army master bombmaker Yu Kikumura. Following the April 15, 1986, U.S. Air Force bombing of Libya, the Libyans employed Kikumura and several of his Red Army colleagues to conduct attacks against U.S. interests. Calling themselves the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, Kikumura and his associates conducted a string of attacks against U.S. interests in Spain, Italy and Indonesia. Kikumura, a fastidious bombmaker, also traveled widely through the United States to obtain the components necessary to fabricate his sophisticated IEDs, which he packed in metal fire-extinguisher canisters. In spite of all this travel, however, Kikumura's bombmaking endeavors did not bring him to the attention of the authorities.
On April 12, 1988, three days before the second anniversary of the 1986 air attack, Kikumura was arrested at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike after a New Jersey state trooper noticed that he was behaving suspiciously. Kikumura's vehicle was found to contain three powerful IEDs and a map with markings that suggested he planned to target a U.S. Navy recruiting center, the United Nations and a Veteran's Administration building. Kikumura, who was convicted in November 1988, served 221 months in a federal penitentiary. He was released in April and turned over to Japanese authorities, who plan to try him in connection with several other terrorism-related crimes.
Law enforcement officers, like all Americans, are far more attuned to the terrorist threat today than they were prior to 9/11. The problem in many jurisdictions is that useful intelligence is not disseminated down the chain of command to the individual officers on the street. This happens, in part, because some criminal intelligence and counterterrorism specialists fail to understand the critical role that officers on the street play in protecting homeland security. In many cases, however, an officer's initiative and instincts make up for this lack of intelligence reporting.
It remains to be seen whether the Goose Creek sheriff's deputy averted a terrorist attack or simply arrested two students who were naively transporting hazardous materials. The role that street cops play in protecting the American public against terrorist attacks, however, cannot be denied.

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http://hydro-logic.blogspot.com/2007/08/kurdistan.html

A new Turkish parliament was sworn in this past weekend with twenty "pro-Kurdish" deputies, the first to represent that ethnic fraction of Turkey since 1991. These deputies, from the Democratic Society Party (DTP), have said that they favor reconciliation and a peaceful solution to the decades-old Kurdish separatist conflict, in which the PKK rebels lay claim to approximately the eastern third of the country. This hopeful note from the recent elections in Turkey follows on recent suggestions that the country may be leaning away from its secular political base to embrace Islam, indicated by a strengthened position for the Muslim Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the parliament and that party's primary roles: (1) selection of the new Turkish president, and apparently (2) agree with the Turkish military leadership that "the time has come to move against the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by its Kurdish initials, PKK, in its bases in the mountains of northern Iraq" (see 6 August 2007 Washington Post story).

In a column this past weekend by Tom Barnett, one of my favorite authors and a specialist on the strategic future of pretty much the entire world, he offered one possible (and mostly "positive thought") view for the Middle East about year from now (see Scripps Howard News Service, listed above). His vision included the following:

"Meanwhile, roughly 20,000 U.S. troops have shifted to Kurdistan. Following Kirkuk's contested vote to join the Kurdistan Regional Government in late 2007, the Turkish military invades northern Iraq to root out strongholds of the Kurdistan Workers Party insurgency. America submits to the U.N.-mandated regional security dialogue led by super-empowered envoy Tony Blair in exchange for the great powers' acceptance of our bases in Kurdistan, which simultaneously ensures its quasi-independence while purposefully dampening its magnetism for separatist movements in Syria, Turkey and Iran."

I should note here that Mr. Barnett works directly with Stephen DeAngelis at their company, Enterra Solutions. Mr. DeAngelis writes for the Enterprise Resilience Management blog, from which several posts on their effort toward "Development-In-A-Box" application in Iraqi Kurdistan are listed above. For the record, in my own e-mail exchange with Mr. Barnett a couple weeks ago he declined to disclose any details at all on how "Development-In-A-Box" works or what they are doing in Iraq, either in general or specifically related to water and other natural resources. It's proprietary, and sensitive, and that's cool with me--the reader knows now that anything I have to say about it is based entirely on what I can find in Mr. Barnett's hints and Mr. DeAngelis' posts, and in the open-source media of course.

Members of the PKK, a group that goes by other names and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, have been fighting for their independence from the Turkish government since about 1983. According to news reports, that conflict has claimed more than 30,000 lives, and members of the PKK have been seeking refuge from Turkish pursuit in northern Iraq. Turkey has been threatening to pursue the PKK insurgents who are hiding in Iraq. Though I'm all against terrorism and its ideologies, I have a couple of problems with this scenario.

First, how in the world will the US military decide to allow independent Turkish incursions across the border into Kurdistan, no matter the purpose? Wouldn't the US military rather say "hold on, we think of them as terrorists too, so to maintain the integrity of our GWOT as well as Iraq's borders, we'll find them for you our way and send them over"? Second, how is the Turkish military going to tell one Kurd from another? I would guess it's not like finding Arab members of al Qaeda hiding out in Pakistan, where they probably stand out like sore thumbs in public, so they stick to their mountain caves. My point here is that the search for PKK among their peaceful, progressive Iraqi brethren must not lead to the indiscriminate detainment of innocent civilians, by the US or its ally Turkey, or the US will have shot itself in yet another foot after all the blowback over Guantanamo, Abu, secret renditions, etc. In the end, it's the US that would allow Turkish incursions and participation in the PKK hunt, not a unilateral decision on Turkey's part, and so the US will take on the majority of the decisions and responsibilities. According to Mr. DeAngelis, Iraqi Kurdistan has moved on to post-conflict reconstruction and development, and both the US military and administration are certainly not going to let an ally go rifling around in what is arguably the most positive outcome of the Iraq War.

Consider also that when the PKK get to Iraq, they're no longer able to do violence against the Turkish government, and so the long-standing US protection of Iraqi Kurdistan offers their only asylum. So finally, we can't expect the PKK to give themselves up on their own. According to Mr. Barnett, the choice is clear: "the Iraqi Kurds must give up the PKK inside their territory." This is where, in Mr. Friedman's terms, the Lexus meets the Olive Tree. Will the Iraqi Kurds give up their Turkish brethren to save themselves? Not if they want to be able to trust and depend on each other later, when it's time to elect a government and build a nation, whatever geographical area that covers. Better to suffer suspicion as a group than death as an individual, right? For the PKK, it will be tough enough to leave behind their homes in Turkey, but they just need to realize that their violence is not leading to any tipping points soon, and there will remain plenty of peaceful Kurds in Turkey who may be able to bring about their desired changes over the long term, hence willful participation by Kurdish parties in the most recent Turkish elections.

Certainly, we need to trust our allies in the Fertile Crescent, among whom we have been able to count (for numerous and widely varied reasons) Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Iraqi Kurds. We can also now count among the allies of America's strategic interests those commercial endeavors, such as Enterra Solutions and its "Development-In-A-Box," that look toward partnership-based sustainable development in the region and not to simple resource (i.e. oil) extraction, the burgeoning industry in private security, and just generally overbilling the feds. However, we can only trust an ally as far as their own national security activities meet our own needs. So now, "the Turkish military invades northern Iraq"? If Mr. Barnett's vision is anything like what may actually play out in that area, then we really need to convince the responsible parties to hold back on all the shooting while we work out some international agreements on the control and distribution of natural resources.

Now, I'm certainly not a policy expert or a foreign affairs specialist or even a strategist, especially on the grand scale that Mr. Barnett claims as home turf, so why do I bring up these issues on a hydrology blog? Because I think a coherent focus on water resources is one way to help shrink the Gap, because American defense and security are deeply invested in the outcome of the Iraq War, because one of my interests is OSINT and "connecting the dots," and because I think I see things happening in and around Kurdistan that seem strange and maybe just a little out of control. Bear with me here...

An independent Iraqi Kurdistan is just one piece of that big ethnic puzzle that is Southwest Asia. Kurds also reside in much of eastern Turkey, northeastern parts of Syria, and along the mountain ranges that form the Turkey-Iran and Iraq-Iran borders. There is a map of ethnic Kurdistan on Wikipedia, if you want to see the full scope of this area we're talking about. In these areas that the Kurds claim as homeland, what can we find to support a recognized independence movement and a nascent government with self-supporting, trade-worthy national infrastructure? Oil of course, and some of the last exploitable forests in the region, and probably some minerals too, but also water. Lots of water, and in strategic places too.

Ethnic Kurdistan is mountainous, and from these mountains come two of the most important rivers in western Asia. Trace the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries from their confluence in southeastern Iraq, and you'll find that much of their watershed area overlaps with ethnic Kurdistan. The Tigris River, the primary water source and sanitation outfall for the city of Baghdad, has its headwaters in the mountains of eastern Turkey. The Tigris is a transboundary river, flowing through Turkey and along the Syrian border and then through Iraq, eventually merging with the Euphrates and then forming the border between Iraq and Iran before flowing into the Persian Gulf. Here's a map of the Tigris-Euphrates watershed area (light area) by Wikipedia contributor Karl Musser, showing the extent of influence for this river system:

In the vicinity of the Tigris headwaters is the brackish Lake Van, from which irrigation canals support one of the largest contiguous agricultural areas in the Middle East. Lake Van, however, is a terminal lake, and may go the way of the Aral Sea if not properly managed for salinity and agricultural runoff contaminants. There are lessons there to be learned from history and analogy, and one hopes that the Kurds may eventually succeed where Turkish state programs have shown little progress.

The Euphrates River is far more contested, however. The Euphrates River headwaters occur farther into the Turkish interior, outside of ethnic Kurdish territory, but flow through much of that territory before meeting the Ataturk Dam and irrigating, by tunnel, the extensive cotton and grain fields of the Harran Plain. Both the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are controlled extensively for both irrigation and hydroelectric power in eastern Turkey under the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). Once of the most controversial aspects of the Turkish effort was construction of a dam immediately upstream of the Euphrates' crossing into Syria, in which the river is also extensively controlled and employed for cotton irrigation.

The Euphrates eventually crosses from Syria into Iraq, provides for more irrigation in the southern provinces, and flows through an extensive alluvial plain along which the fabled Tigris-Euphrates salt marshes occur. Around 1994, more than half of the marshes were drained and destroyed by Saddam Hussein's regime in order to exert greater control over the indigenous Ma'daan, or Shi'a Muslim Marsh Arabs, during which time numerous plant and animal species dependent on the brackish ecosystem disappeared entirely.

Ethnic Kurdistan holds in its hands the keys to water security in a large portion of the Middle East. The supplies of water to the people of the region, sanitation, irrigation, power production, and depleted ecosystems all fall within the responsibilities of both Iraqi, and ethnic, Kurds who push for responsibility and independence. While Turkey has made significant progress in infrastructure and in agricultural planning, most areas in Iraq are just beginning their course of post-conflict reconstruction, and must begin to manage their water resources with the end in mind: sustainability.

Iraqi Kurdistan reaches for sustainability in both independence and government, and at the same time must not neglect the sustainability of its most vital natural resource. Its success in international relations with its neighbors, to hold off Turkish military incursions, to assuage the Syrians (and maybe even the Turks) that Kurds in their country need not rise up in a movement for independence, and to deal prosperously with whatever government eventually arises in Baghdad, may be foretold from how the Kurdish people develop one of their most basic necessities, the water on which Kurdistan's people, agriculture, industry, and economy will depend.
Posted by M. Garcia on Tuesday, August 07, 2007